How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?

We had so much fun with our apple unit that we decide to use many of the same scientific ideas with our pumpkins!!  We compared the two FRUITS - yes, they are BOTH fruits - that information ended up on our RAN chart in our "New Information" box!!! And did some investigating of the outside of our pumpkins before we went elbow deep into the inside.  We enjoyed making some predictions about how many seeds would be in our pumpkin and then we dove in...

This is what we found -

Red - 117
Orange - 133
Yellow 418
Green 374
Blue - 0 - yes 0!!!  They then tried the smallest pumpkin in the room and found 179!!
Purple - 352

That's a lot of seeds!!!  1573 to be exact!!!

Of course we then had to see how it tastes so after we added some cinnamon and sugar - that always makes things taste better - we asked Miss Heidi in the kitchen to roast it for us.  Ask your child if they tried it and what they thought...

Making Apple Sauce

We enjoyed using some of our left over apples from the family literacy event to make some apple sauce last week!!!  Our room smelled wonderful all day as it cooked away in the crock pot :-)

Some of us LOVED it...

And some of us didn't...but we tried it to make sure :-)

We did a pretty good job eating it all up....

Math!!!

Today was day number 60 in kindergarten!!  We enjoy counting the days of school each day in our Daily Math Routine which is lead by our Special Helper.  Last week we started counting by 10s and then counting on until we reach our daily number.  Ask your kindergartener how we do our "finger flashing" as we count by tens, "freeze", and then "count on by ones".  They are really good at it!!

Over the past couple weeks your child has brought home some paper manipulatives (green triangles,blue parallellograms, plus and minus symbols on green, and coin strips) from our math series to be used at home to practice work that we've done at school.  These manipulatives go along with the purple number tiles and the red/blue square inch tiles that came home earlier in the year.  See the photos below for how to have your child arrange their manipulatives on a cookie sheet, work tray, or even on a piece of paper.

The kids start out by arranging their numbers 1 through 10 across the top from left to right.  Their other manipulatives should be down at the bottom out of the way.  Use the coins, the green and blue shapes, or the red and blue square inch tiles in the same way at different times to change it up a bit.  When doing these activities we tie it into "5 groups" to help the children see, for instance that "7 is 5 plus 2 more" AND that we can show this with our fingers, with the groups of objects on the tray, and with number partners (5 + 2). 

Apples, Apples, Everywhere!!!

We had a wonderful time at the Apple Family Literacy Event last week!! We enjoyed getting to meet grandparents, aunts, and friends. So glad that you could all make it and hope you enjoyed the special time with your children. The kids enjoyed so many activities during the event...please enjoy the video slideshow of pictures!

For the week prior to our Apple Family Literacy event, we enjoyed many inquiry based activities having to do with apples. We started our "Scientific Study" of apples by completing the first part of our RAN chart..."What do we think we know?" and boy did we know a lot!!! We then read lots of books and moved our sticky notes of information to "Confirmed" or added new sticky notes to "New Information"- WOW!!  We sure did get smarter!!!

We spent time investigating the outside of the apple and added some "Wonderings" to our chart - "Will the apple sink or float?", "What are the white dots on the apple?", "Are the seeds slimmy?" Of course we also had to investigate the inside of the apple - dissecting! and TASTING!!

 We created a class model of the apple and labeled the parts, made our own labels - just like scientists! and created our own small models and attached the labels. Such great scientific work!!!

 Our Science Work Station:

Princesses and Witches and Spiderman, Oh My!!

FINALLY was able to have the technical difficulties with the Halloween video worked out...it was such a fun party!!! Thank you to Jennifer S., Ellen H., and Jill B. for all your work and to Heather C. for taking pictures to share.

A Science Experiment!

On Friday morning we met with our second grade reading/science buddies in Miss T's class for the first time! We worked with our buddy to cut out two paper ghosts and then conducted some very scientific experiments to see how we could make changes to our ghosts to get them to spin. We first tried just dropping our ghosts, we then added a paperclip to the bottom to see if weight might help, next we bent the arms - one forward and one back while keeping the paperclip on the bottom, last we bent both arms forward.

We used lots of great describing words: float, spin, fast, slow, medium, glide - and we had lots of scientific ideas about why making changes to the ghosts arms and adding the paperclip helped to make the ghost spin. The kids were even able to tie their thinking into what they know about fans, swimming, and air movement!! Miss T and I were quite impressed with their predictions, observations, analysis, and conclusions. The kids brought their ghosts home so that they can share their learning with you!