A bunny bed

We saw a bunny on our playground the other day so we made him a bunny bed!

Frozen Ice Chunk Toys!

As you guys know, we spent all of last week taking the SAT 10 test.  To celebrate being finished with testing and doing a fantastic job, we got to play with ice chunks!  I put a toy in a water balloon and froze it.  We cut off the balloon and the kids got to crush their ice chunk until they got their toy.  It was also very hot last Thursday when we did it so we had fun using the ice to cool ourselves off!

Mystery Guest #3

Captain America Grandma Val came to talk to us about Washington D.C. and how our country was created by us, the people.

We got to put together a map of the National Mall so we could see where all the important landmarks are!

Little Captain America and Ms. Baker with out fun goody bag from Grandma Val!

Having fun with our new goodies!

We learned a lot from Grandma Val about our country.  We LOVE the USA!

Mystery Guest #2

 Last week our mystery guest was a professional artist who specializes in Native American and Cowboy art.  He also happens to be the grandfather (Babop) of one of our classmates!  He brought in some of his work which was awesome.  The kids were all super impressed.  He also told us how he goes about doing a painting and all the research he does to get the details just right (the kids really like that because I am always telling them to add details!)  He then gave us a piece of paper with circles and taught us how many things you can draw starting with a circle.  We have some creative kids in our class!

Chimpanzees

After our field trip to see the movie Chimpanzee (of which I unfortunatley do not have any pictures) we made chimpanzee masks!  The kids loved being Oscar.  We also did dbox with our chimp masks on!

Letters from our Grandparents

To practice writing a letter and to continue our study of maps and the world, we all wrote letters to our grandparents.  We asked that they send us a postcard to tell us about where they are from.  We have gotten postcards from all over the United States as well as 2 from Canada.  They have been so much fun to read!  Thank you grandparents for participating in this project with us!

Task Force

The other day we did some very cute Earth day pictures.  My idea was that they would hang in the classroom replacing the flags that had been up for a while.  Another student wanted them to hang up in the hallway though.  So...we decided to make this a great lesson in Shared Values which is an Imagine Schools philosophy.  One of the shared values is fun which says that in an organization it is important for everyone to have ownership and everyone to make decisions.  We have a decision maker board in our class and each kid has had a chance to make a decision this year but this time we took it a step further.  If something needs to be decided in our school, we form a task force that has a leader who chooses the decision maker and they talk amongst themselves about the decision and the decision maker seeks advice from others as well.  With guidance, the child who had a differing idea than me formed a task force and  appointed a decision maker who came to the decision that we should hang our pictures in the hallway so more people could see them.  It was awesome to see this shared value in action with the kindergartners!