Butterflies

Beautiful Butterflies!

In honor of spring,  Earth Day, and our study of nonfiction reading and writing, we are learning all about butterflies.  Our caterpillars arrived Friday, April 20th.  Upon arrival, we began learning about the life cycle of a butterfly.  We read a poster about The Life Cycle of the Painted Lady Butterfly that had features of nonfiction that we have been learning about like a heading, photographs, and labels! 

 Over the weekend, most of our caterpillars finished their transition into their chrysalises, except for one.  This morning we had the opportunity to watch as our last caterpillar transitioned!  We were concerned about the butterflies having enough space when they emerged, so we moved the chrysalises to these houses with little windows. 

 We are eagerly awaiting their emergence as fully grown, adult butterflies.  We have learned that this usually takes 7-10 days.  While we wait, we will be reading more nonfiction texts about butterflies.  We will also be making a math connection by adding links to a chain that will help us keep track of how long our butterflies are taking to transform!

The Release!

After 10 days, all of our butterflies had emerged from each chrysalis, and were ready to be set free.  Here are pictures from their release:

 Happy National Poetry Month!  We have used poetry in our literacy learning all year long.  Poems are a great way to introduce rhyme and reading with fluency.  Reading poems is fun!  We also look within poems that we have learned to practice predicting beginning sounds and endings sounds.  We have also practiced finding specific letters or Word Wall words.  By now, most of my students know all their Kindergarten words, so we have begun adding some first grade words to our word wall:

 This month, we have been learning Rainy Day by Gina Bell-Zano.  Today we highlighted our high frequency words with highlighter tape and read the poem a silly way by only reading the highlighted words.  Then we read it correctly.  We did such a great jobs with our reading!  Click the links below for videos of us reading!

 

AM Class "Rainy Day" Shared Reading

PM Class "Rainy Day" Shared Reading

 For more children's poems and poetry activities, please visit this great website:

http://www.poetry4kids.com/

Mrs. Curry's Kindergarten, how does your garden grow?

Mrs. Curry's Kindergarten,

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We recently began a whole science unit on Life & Living Things in The World Around Us.  To synthesize this concept, we are focusing on plants in a garden.  We began the unit talking about how plants have different parts: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits/vegetables, and seeds, and with some plants you can eat some of these parts.  We looked at squash, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, and turnips.  We matched to word with the vegetable by predicting beginning sounds.  Then we constructed sentences using sight word cards from our word wall and vegetable words taken from seed packets.  Using these tools, we made sentences like: "A tomato is a plant that I can eat." OR "A carrot is a root that I can eat."  To reinforce concepts of print (like the fact that spaces separate words), we cut apart the words in our sentences and then tried to glue them back together in order.  The results looked like this:

 

 

Then we planted a vegetable garden, making sure to talk about the things plants need to grow: Sun, water, warmth, nutrients from the soil, and space to grow.  This is what our garden looked like after planting it:

 We have been watering it, leaving it in the sunshine, and bringing it inside if it is supposed to be very cold at night.

While we are waiting for it to grow, we have been reading so many things to learn about plants and gardens!  Within this genre we have also been looking at the difference between fiction and nonfiction.  We have learned the structure of a fiction story (with a beginning that sets it up, a middle that has action and/or a problem, and an ending that resolves and wraps it up) and the features of nonfiction (true information, diagrams, illustrations, labels, photographs, and bold words).  Here are some of the things we have read so far:

 



Our garden is growing!  Look at this progress: