Monday, March 31, 2014

Living and Non-Living

Happy Spring!  Over the last 2 weeks we have been discussing Living vs. Non Living.  At first, I asked them to tell me all they knew about Living Things.  They gave great examples, such as; people, animals, cats, mom and dad, nature, trees, plants.  I was impressed.  Then we talked about non-living things.  They mentioned a chair was non living.  Some other examples were; table, notebook, trashcan. They were right on!  The next question really got them thinking.  I asked them. "How do you know if something is living or not?"  That is when we got into the characteristics of living things.  Here is the list we talked about.


We watched a video that helped explain living vs. non-living and it even talked about once-living.  Ask your child and see if they can tell you what each one means.  We were also able to read a couple books about living and non-living and complete some sorts.


One day last week we decided to make a living and non-living collage to show what we knew.  Together in groups of 9, the kids worked together to look through magazines and find pictures of living things or non-living things, depending on what group they were in.  Then we were able to share what we found.  Here is a picture of their hard work.  They did awesome.







Friday, March 14, 2014

February/March..in review!

It has been a very long winter.  We are surely ready for Spring.  The Zakar's have been busy bees in room 8.  We are making such great leaps with our learning and we would love to share what has been going on lately.  Enjoy our last month or so in pictures!


We started our Opinion Writing Unit.  The kids can not only give their own opinion, but they can give a reason for that opinion! We read Tops and Bottoms and decided if we liked Hare better or Bear.  Then we have to tell why we liked them.  They are doing great!













Geometric Solids Day:
cylinder
sphere
cone
pyramid
cube
rectangular prism

We created geometric solids from paper with help from Miss Mills







We built cubes, pyramids, and rectangular prisms using
 marshmallows (vertices) and toothpicks (edges).










We created ramps from blocks to determine if our geometric solids could roll, slide or stack!
We also worked together to figure out how many vertices and faces each shape had!










More pictures from our Geometric Solids Day!










































Our favorite season.. (part of our Opinion writing unit)
They did an awesome job on the morning message!








We learned how to write a friendly letter so that we could send letters through our Post Office!




















What is your favorite Dr. Seuss book?
We made Thing 1 and Thing 2 hats and wrote what our favorite book was and why!










Favorite Season graphic organizer and opinion writing!