Creating our own marble runs

After our playground experiment the students were challenged to create their own marble runs. They could use anything in our class, and the objective was to get the marble from the table to the cup. Here are some pictures of their neat ideas:

Gravity as Energy!

Today we explored how toys use gravity as a source of energy. They were challenged to find a way to make their toys (cars and balls) move without being pushed, pulled, or thrown. The rules were that they could use the play equipment and they may carry the toys someplace, but once they let go of the toys, the toys have to travel by themselves without a push or a pull. Here are some pictures of the students experimenting. They were quick to discover that they could drop their toy, or put it on the slide to make it move by itself

Energy

Starting this week we have been talking about how toys get their energy to move. We learned that people can give toys energy by throwing, pushing, and pulling toys. We also learned that batteries can give toys energy to move. Today we used an elastic to give a paper airplane energy to fly across our classroom. Some students made their own paper airplanes. They told me that they were giving the airplanes energy to move!

Kindergarten's Got Talent!

Last week during centres some of the students decided to make a concert. They started to bring chairs to the carpet for the audience. Mrs. McCain showed the class some clips of talent shows. We talked a lot about practising to perfect our talent. We also talked about how to be a good audience. During our first centre time the students worked on their talents, and some developed new talents. Some students took up instrumental music, and some made their own! Here are some pictures of our fabulous production:

Here are some students making musical instruments!!

Letters to Santa

Today we started our letters to Santa. We will walk to the post office and mail our letters on Wednesday. We heard that Santa might respond to our letters!

Painting with marshmallows

Today we found that the marshmallows that we used for s'mores had gone hard. So, why not paint with them!

Big box fun!

Today Mrs. Shepley brought us in a HUGE box! During our 'talking ball' circle we talked about things we could make out of the box. Some suggestions were: spaceship, boat, ninja hideout, haunted house, tree fort, castle, and so many more. After lunch we decided to take a vote.

Haunted house won, but not by much! Here are some friends working hard on creating the Haunted House!

We've gone survey crazy!!

Students in our class have decided to create their surveys. Some even decided to graph their results. This is a math skill that we will continue to work on throughout the year.

Patterning

Today we worked on patterning using the Smartboard. The students loved finishing the pattern of the dinosaur tracks. The game can be found on pbskids.org. Here is the link: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/resources/7661/preview/