This week during choice time there has been great interest in sewing.  Children have been using felt to design their own creations.  Other than help threading the needles they have been remarkably independent in both designing and sewing.  It has been a great opportunity to work on having a growth mindset, rolling with mistakes and imperfections and persisting through frustration.  It has also provided lots of opportunity for students to help each other out as I have been pretty occupied with threading needles!

During ECO on Wednesday students worked in pairs looking for shapes in nature.  Once we started looking, it was amazing how many shapes we found! While students were searching for shapes we cooked potatoes over the fire- a warm and delicious treat on a chilly morning!  Thank you for sending children prepared for the cold.

This week we began our artist residency working with local potter Leslie Montalto.  Each student will be making a bowl for our Empty Bowls event in May.  (I'll give further updates as they come!)  Everyone had lots of fun designing and shaping their bowls.  Students also had an opportunity to make a small pinch pot and help Leslie as she threw a bowl on a pottery wheel.  We will continue our work with Leslie next week as well.

Today we shared our nature name books and paper mache with our third and fourth grade buddies.  Kindergarteners shared their projects with lots of pride and the third and fourth graders were excellent listeners.  I heard many compliments and words of encouragement.

This week our focus for ECO was beavers.  We are fortunate to have a stuffed beaver residing in our classroom for the week, so we are able to do some close observations and get a really good sense of what a real beaver looks like as well as some of the features that help them survive.  One classmate had a chance to dress up as a beaver so we could check out some of these characteristics!  In the forest children used peelers to whittle sticks and  worked in teams to build dams (it was too cold to actually do this in water, but I think they got a good sense of process- we may try again on a warmer day.)

Another highlight of our week was getting a couch for the classroom.  The pre-school was replacing their couch and generously gave us the old one.  It has been a huge hit!

This week in math we have been exploring measurement of objects by their weight.  Children had an opportunity to use balance scales to compare two objects, noting which object was heavier.  We then moved on to more precise measurement, using sets of pennies and sets of counting bears to weigh different objects.  This has also provided practice with counting higher numbers as children have chosen some heavier objects to weigh.  Children have been doing a really nice job working with partners on these tasks.

During ECO this week our focus was on making ink with plants.  Children had lots of fun mashing and mixing to create  inks using various plants.  Blueberries and hibiscus seemed to give us the most color.  While the ink was steeping we spent some time outside looking for natural materials that could be used for drawing or writing.  We wrapped up our morning testing out the ink!

Earlier this week we created track scenes and short stories to accompany them.  Children then made puppets and did a shadow show for their stories.   It's always lots of fun to hear the tracking stories and watch them unfold in the dark!

We also painted our paper mache animals and added some final embellishments.  These will stay in the classroom until our books are done and we have had a chance to share them with our reading buddies.  Everyone has put a great effort into all parts of this project and are feeling pretty proud of their final products!

Chickadee, Coyote, Moose, and Bobcat.

Red Fox, Cottontail Rabbit, Black Bear, and River Otter.

A class portrait!

We are in the midst of writing informational pieces about our nature name animals.  Last week we began the process by thinking of questions a person would have about an animal if they knew nothing about it.   We have been gathering information to answer each of these questions, which will be turned into a book for each child.  We are fortunate to have kindergarten friendly books on most of this year's nature names and almost all of the children have also been able to access information on a site called PebbleGo, a data base for emerging readers.  A really nice feature of this site is that the information is read out loud.  Children had lots of fun creating paper mache animals which will be a visual accompaniment for this writing.

We enjoyed another PJ and stuffie day and added lunch in the classroom to our celebration!