The 100th Day of School

Today was the 100th Day of School! All day we spent working in different 100th day activities. Here is a quick look at our day.

Morning stations (rotating)

Math Game- Race to 100:

Building with 100 Legos:

Writing what we would and wouldn't want 100 of:

Building 100 cup structures: 

Making 100 days smarter crowns:

We also wrote about what we think our lives will be like when we are 100. They turned out so great! Make sure to visit our art gallery outside the classroom to see them. For math, we tested out how many times we could do lots of different things in 100 seconds (clap, write our name, etc.)

We ended the day with an experiment to see how many licks it took to make a lollipop disappear!

What a great day! 

~Mrs. C

Umbrellas

Last week my budding engineers took on the challenge of using the engineering process to plan, build, test and present umbrellas. They had the choice to either work with a partner or alone. Their umbrella had to have all of the parts of an umbrella and keep either them or a stuffed animal dry in the rain. Let the challenge begin!

Students started with planning. They had to draw out their umbrella and label the parts with the materials they wanted to use. Day 2 they got to explore with materials to start their build.

Day 3-4, students started to test (I sprayed down and around on them with a pray water bottle to simulate rain) and improve their design...

Day 5, students presented their umbrella designs and completed a self-evaluation of their work. Here are 2 of our successful umbrellas:

I even made an umbrella for our class bear! 

I can't wait for our next engineering project!

~Mrs. C

Art and Engineering Challenges!

Wednesday

Have you ever given directions to someone to make something and the final product turned out different than what you imagined? It's hard to give directions that are clear and concise sometimes! And in kindergarten sometimes it's hard to listen to directions! 

As an engineering challenge, students worked with a partner building with Legos in what I like to call "battleship style." Two engineers had a partition between them. One student was the teller and the other was the builder. After they placed all their Legos, they checked to see if their creation was the same. Wow is it hard! But it was also fun! Check it out in action:

We did have couple of successes!

And a lot of failures!

But we learned a lot about listening and being clear with our words and directions.

Friday

Today with our second  buddies we talked about how artist use shapes in their art. In honor of love and friendship our artists were given the challenge of making an animal out of hearts! They made pandas, butterflies, lions and more! Here is some of the work in progress:

Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for our heart animals to be displayed in the hallway. 

Then in the afternoon, we worked on an engineering challenge. Pairs of students were given a tray of materials: cups, Popsicle sticks and 1 in cubes. In their pair they had to build structures with different challenges. 

Challenge #1: build a sturdy structure with 1 cube as the base.

Challenge #2: using any base, build the tallest structure possible.

Challenge #3: build a structure using 1 cup as the base.

It was such a fun day!

~Mrs. C

Measurement, weather and buddy art!

We have been working on measurement in class. Some of the key words we have been using are length, long, width, tall, height, and short. 

Here we are lining up from tallest to shortest:

This week we are moving on to talk about weight. We will be discussing lighter and heavier. 

In the world of weather we made rain gauges to measure rain over the course of several days. Here are some meteorologists checking their rain gauges and recording their findings:

We also had our first art lesson with our second grade buddies! We learned about lines and patterns and then used crayon and water color paint to show our learning.

~Mrs. C