If You Give a Mom a Muffin

Happy Mother's Day!!  Here is our book that we made for Muffins for Mom on Friday.  Enjoy!  

Gone Buggy!

We spent two week learning about insects and we had an absolute blast!  It is one of my favorite units that we do in Kindergarten.  

We started off by creating our Insects Schema Chart.  Throughout the unit, we recorded our new learning and moved things from our schema over to misconceptions.  For example, at the beginning of our unit we thought that worms were insects.  Then we learned that insects have three main body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), six legs, and compound eyes.  We then had to move our "worms are insects" sticky note to misconceptions.  

We learned that most insects have compound eyes.  This makes them see the same pictures hundreds of times.  We took a look through some bug viewers and recorded what we saw.  We decided that it would be pretty hard to see using compound eyes.  That is why insects have to rely so much on their other senses.  

We studied a lot of different insects over the two week unit, but one of our favorites was the bee.  We did a really fun experiment to help us figure out exactly how bees spread pollen.  We each wore a bee finger puppet like the one below.  

We had to fly around the room and land on flowers.  We would drink our nectar from the middle of the flower (represented by cheetos).  The cheetos would leave dust on our fingers (the cheeto dust represented the pollen).  When we flew to another flower, the cheeto dust left a mark.  By the end of the experiment our flowers were covered in cheeto dust or "pollen".  This showed us exactly how bees spread pollen!  It was a lot of fun!  

During our insect unit, we did an Eric Carle author study.  A lot of his books are about insects.  We read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "The Grouchy Ladybug", "The Very Quiet Cricket", and many more!  We learned a lot about Eric Carle and his style of writing.  One of our favorite things we learned is that he spends part of his time in the hills of North Carolina.  Too cool!  

Plants and Seeds

After our study of farms we moved into our plant unit.  We talked about seeds and what plants need in order to grow.  We learned about the parts of plants and their function.  We also sorted plants by ones we eat and ones we don't.  We even learned that we can eat roots!  

At the end of our study of plants, we planted some grass buddies.  We put soil in a cup, added the grass seed, watered them, and put them in the windowsill so they could get sunlight.  We did this on a Thursday and came back after the weekend and found these!  Too cute!  

We also did a fun math activity with seeds.  We opened up a variety of fruits and vegetables and counted how many seeds they had in them.  Then we graphed them on a bar graph.  It was very interesting!  

Farm Animals

Sorry I have been a little MIA here lately on our blog! I'm going to take the next few posts to catch up. :)

After our big trip to the farm, we finished up our study of farm animals.  We learned about how baby farm animals find their mothers using their sense of smell.  We did a little experiment to see how it worked.  We had little jars that contained different items with strong scents (mouthwash, cinnamon, etc.). We separated the lids and jars and mixed the all up.  Everyone got a piece and they had to use their sense of smell to find their mate.  It was harder than we expected!! It was fun though!

We didn't get to see any cows on our trip to the farm, but we did get to meet Eaton's very own Bessie the cow!  We even got to milk her! Check out our pictures below!