Sea Horses and Starfish

This week we focused on the sea horse and starfish.  The K-Kids loved learning about the two different animals' special physical features and facts.  Through non-fiction text, videos, and pictures the K-Kids were able to really understand these two unique animals.  Over the last couple of weeks, the K-Kids have been adding to their ocean books.  I am excited to send home the finished books before spring break!

Math lessons this week were hands-on and fun!  The K-Kids worked with the 100s chart a little more and completed a fun and engaging listening activity that asked them to color in certain squares on the chart.  As they followed the directions, a picture from the colored squares slowly emerged.  The K-Kids also learned the names of solid 3-D shapes and brought in items from home to display in our shape museum.  I love hearing the kiddos pick up and talk about the various spheres, cones, rectangular prisms, and cubes!  We also worked on gathering data and completing a bar graph to display the collected information.  Each K-Friend analyzed his or her data and wrote about their results.

During Writer's Workshop this week, the K-Kids wrote about facts about sea horses.  The mini-lesson focused on "what is a fact?" and use of letter spacing and capitalization.  The K-Kids also made sea horses out of paper plates and attached their sea horses to their ocean scenes.  The K-Kids also learned about photo captions in non-fiction texts.  They each received a picture of a starfish and were encouraged to write a non-fiction caption to match the given picture.  This was tricky, but the K-Kids did a great job with the activity!

Next week we will move onto the very interesting and smart animal- the octopus!