Handwashing

We had some special visitors from Irmo High School today!  The four high school students came to teach us how to properly wash our hands and why it is important to do so.  We learned that we should be washing our hands after we go to the bathroom, before lunch and after lunch.  Warm water is important while we wash our hands (not cold water or hot water).  Since this is the time of year when people typical get colds we talked about where to cough and sneeze.  Many people sneeze into their hands but this makes spreading germs easy!  Instead, we should all be sneezing into our elbows.  We have already been practicing this in our classroom!!  To demonstrate the germs that are released into the air when we blow our nose (without covering with our elbow) the high school students used baby powder to show how the germs would go everywhere!  We then got to put some "germs" on our hands (baby powder) to show how when we shake our friends' hands we transfer these germs.  At the very end we put our hands under this special light to see the germs that we already had on our hands.  This was very eye opening!  Below are some pictures from today!

Teacher Cadet

We are so excited to have a Teacher Cadet from Chapin High School with us every other day!  Ms. McCall started with our class this past Tuesday and we LOVE her already!  She has been so amazing with the kids and the kids absolutely adore her!  Here are a few pictures of Ms. McCall and the boys!

100th Day of Kindergarten

I cannot believe that we have already been in school for 100 days!!  We had a great time celebrating the 100th day of kindergarten today!  We did a lot of things in school surrounding the number 100.  We wrote numbers to 100, read books about the 100th day, and even wrote about what we couldn't do at the beginning of kindergarten but can now do after 100 days.  Our favorite activity was guessing what objects each person brought in from home!  The students read their three clues to the class so that they could guess what objects were in their brown, paper bag!  Everyone was super creative and it was such a fun activity!  Here is a CrAzY picture from our 100th day celebration!!

Bug Feeling Strategies

We LOVE when our guidance counselor, Mrs. Sitsch, and Ruthie Bell come to visit us!!  Each time they visit us Mrs. Sitsch helps us with our feelings and friends.  This week she came into our classroom and taught us a new "bug feeling strategy".  The strategy can be used if you are feeling frustrated with yourself.  It is called "take a break".  To use this strategy you walk away from whatever task you are engaged in and after you have taken your break you go back and return to the task.  A sign that we learned to show others that we need to "take a break" is to make a "T" with our hands.  You can see this in the picture below.  All of the strategies that Mrs. Sitsch has taught us have been great!  My personal favorite is the "bubble breathing"!  Ask your child if they have been using their "bug feeling strategies"!  If they are, see which ones are their favorite!

Opinion Writing Celebration!

Last week we celebrated all of the hard work that we have done in writing workshop!  We finished up our unit on opinion writing pieces and wanted to celebrate and share our work with our friends.  We spent the week preparing.  First we looked through all of our writing and picked our favorite piece that we were proud of.  Then we went back to edit.  We added details to our pictures, made sure our punctuation and capital letters were in the correct place and made sure we could read everything.  Here is a picture from the whole group part of our celebration!  We have a lot to celebrate in the Learning Lambs class!

Ice Experiments

This week in social science we have been exploring ice.  We have done all kinds of ice experiments and learned a ton!  Some of the things that we learned about was insulation, what salt does to ice, how ice is formed and what ice can turn into.  We learned about different things that freeze and do not freeze and the reason for this.  Here is a picture of one of our ice experiments!  The picture was taken during the tasting part of our five senses investigation.  Ask your child about these ice experiments and try some of them out at home.

Welcome back!

We have all had a wonderful first week back from our winter break!  I hope that you all were able to spend some quality time with your families.  When the kids came in Monday they all seemed to have grown and gotten taller!  We have spent the week learning new things, reviewing others and catching up with good friends in our class!  Getting back into the routine can sometimes be difficult, but all of the kids seem to be doing very well!  One of the highlights of our week was when we conducted a sink or float experiment.  We had a blast with it!  Ask your child what all they learned as scientists!