Learning Mural Day!

It's our first school day in January, which means it's Learning Mural Day! 

Learning Mural days are special days on the first school day of the month.  We reflect on our learning from the previous month and collaborate to create representations of that learning.  Each monthly learning mural is featured on the walls of our classroom. 

First we brainstorm all the learning that we can think of:

After brainstorming, we partner up to collaborate on creating projects.

As we finish each project, we make a label and pick a new project.

After it's complete, we hang it up on the wall!

That's a lot of learning for 16 days!

Space Party!

Right before winter break we celebrated our space inquiry by having a space party!
The morning started out by getting sucked into the black hole of our classroom.

The room was decorated with constellations, planets hanging from the ceiling, and starry lights.

We tried astronaut food in the morning...

dehydrated fruit

dehydrated ice cream

dehydrated ice cream sandwiches

First, we split up our packages of dehydrated fruit equally.

Most of us liked the dehydrated food, but we had to be sure to drink lots of water!

In the middle of our taste-testing we had a special visitor!

Later in the day we had lots of fun space stations.  We dressed up our stuffed animals like astronauts, made straw rockets, played Space Bingo, and more!  Watch the video to see all our fun!

We ended the day with special space treats and watching the movie Space Buddies.

Levi's grandma made some extra special space cookies!

What a great day!

Winter Solstice

Mrs. Heins' Kindergarten class has been studying the Arctic.  They found out that there are times in the year that there are 24 hours of darkness (around the Winter Solstice) and 24 hours of daylight (around the Summer Solstice).  They didn't understand why, so our class visited their Winter Solstice party and taught them all about the tilt of the Earth and how that causes 24 hours of darkness and daylight.

What a great way to share our own learning from our space inquiry!

Dogs!

We had a special guest visit our classroom...Ainsley's dog!

Later we got to visit with the Humane Society.  We teamed up with the other first graders in Hillcrest to gather donations for all the animals at the Humane Society. 

We even got to meet a great dog who knew lots of tricks!

Sea Star Quilt

For math we began making a Sea Star class quilt.  We started by noticing different mathematical patterns that we can find in quilts, such as this one.

We also read a poem about sea stars and learned cool facts about them.  We learned that sea stars regenerate their arms, they aren't like fish because they don't have brains or backbones, and that when they eat, their stomach comes out of their body!  We found a youtube video to prove this last fact:

Next, we each created a Sea Star quilt block.

Then we decorated a piece of paper with dot painters.  These will be the design papers from which we'll cut our sea stars.  

Sea Stars will be a perfect way to notice counting by 5s patterns!

Five...

Ten...

Fifteen...

Stay tuned to see what you notice about our sea star quilt!

What are you thinking about sea stars?

Space Inquiry Coalescing Stage

During the Coalescing Stage we organize all our research and decide on the things that we would like to teach others about our Research Clubs. 
First, we have the big task of grouping our learning post-its together.

After, we circle the groups of common post-its and label each circle.  In the end, it looks something like this:

Next, we discuss the topics and decide who is going to teach each topic.

Coming up next is our Going Public stage!