Floating boats graphs

Today we were learning about Thailand's  festival Loi Krathong. Part of this festival is the floating of boats down a river. The boats are made from leaves and have candles on them. In our class activity, we made boats from foil. Then we put marbles on the boats while they were floating to see which design held the most marbles without sinking. We also made graphs to show the amount of marbles for each child. 

Fireman visit

The firemen from East Montpelier came to school and talked to us about kitchen safety. Then we were able to go outside no see the trucks and go through the ambulance.

Future architects and builders

Block play is a valuable learning experience for young children. Children learn math skills such as color, shapes, sorting, ordering, counting, size, and one to one correspondence. Blocks also provide opportunities for problem solving, sequencing and patterns. The open- ended nature of blocks can encourage creativity and socialization. Children can develop an understanding of cause and effect, balance and stability through experimentation of spatial relationships of blocks. Representation and logical reasoning are also concepts children learn through block play.

Pumpkin fun

Today we had fun guessing how much yarn was needed to go around a pumpkin. It is a great way to use comparison words such as too long or too short. We had 3 children that guessed the exact amount needed.

We also used Halloween pattern cards and the children completed pumpkin puzzles.

School fun

Yesterday we had a visit from the the Kellogg Hubbard Library's Nicole. She read two stories about monsters and then we made monster pictures with paper and glue.

Learning to recognize our names in fun when you can slap the letters.

We have been learning to count using dice.

During our study of bodies, we traced our bodies and then colored them and we made drawings under a table with the paper attached to the bottom of the table for a different view.

Elephants can paint too!

After reading the book Elephants Can Paint Too! , the children were asked to paint like the elephants using only their mouth. The hardest part was picking up the paintbrush. Another problem was the paper would move around. It was a fun activity for the children.

Pajama Day Pillow Fights

Experimenting with Plants

We started our plant unit with an activity to show what a plant needs to grow. The children pretended to be seeds, rooting their feet on the floor so they couldn't move. Then I sprinkled small colored pieces of paper on top of them.The children did not know what the colors represented- blue was for water, brown was for soil, and yellow was for sun. I also included a few red papers for diseases and black for bugs.  The children picked up as many papers as they could without moving their feet. Then we looked at what each child had to see if they would survive. If they had no blue ones, they wouldn't survive. If they had more yellow than the others, they may live in a desert. If they had too many blue, they might drown. The red or black automatically died. It was a good way to show how hard it is for a seed to survive. 

It was also fun to see celery leaves turn blue after the celery stem was put in blue water. It is a great way to show how plants absorb water and nutrients.

We have had fun learning about plants and what they need to grow. We did an experiment planting seeds in water/ no water, dirt/ no dirt, and light/ no light. The children predicted which ones would grow and were amazed that all the seeds grew except the one with no water. The seed with no light grew the fastest and the leaves were yellow and scrawny instead of green. The seed in water with no dirt also grew roots but stopped growing when the sprouts started.