Snowflake Breakfast

It's hard to know where to start,  those screws are so small.

It's hard work taking this VCR apart.  Everyone has to work together.

We had our first annual Snowflake Breakfast at Seabury this week.  It was so much fun!  We gathered all of the lower school kids and staff in our room (with a little overflow in the MPR room) for pancakes, fruit and juice.  The kids helped with the set up and clean up and ate every pancake we made!  After the eating,  Mrs. Blackwood led us in some singing.  We're hoping to make this an annual event.

Pete the Cat

creating our surveys

adding up the tally marks

This past week we've been enjoying the "Pete the Cat" books by Eric Litwin and James Dean.  This was my first experience with these books and they are wonderful!  These books provided us with opportunities for art, reading and math.  Today we created surveys and then went to the other classes to collect data about shoe colors.  For the record, black was the most common shoe color at Seabury today.  The bottom picture is a video, be sure to check it out!

Pajama Day

Today, the whole school had pajama day!  Big kids read to little kids and little kids read to big kids.  We drank cocoa and ate graham crackers and enjoyed being together in a relaxed atmosphere.   Before
gathering, some of our parents stopped in and checked out what we've been doing in the classroom.   It was a good day!

Authors in action

The theater is dog friendly and comes with a menu for snacks.

Our restaurant has morphed into a theater.

Each of our Ladybugs had a partner from the Octipi class.   The older children helped the younger kids figure out a story to write with a beginning and an ending.  They also helped them illustrate their books.    
It was a wonderful partnership!

Little Red Hen

the prices on that menu were amazing!  $900 for strawberry soup!

making cloud observations

It takes a lot of thought to get those drawings just right!

This week the Ladybugs have been learning about the story "Little Red Hen".  We ground wheat berries, watched yeast bubble up and played with bread dough (and baked bread).  We made chef hats and opened a restaurant, wrote menus, took food orders and talked about how we help at home.  We worked on math equations and observed different types of clouds during collaborative time.   It was a very busy week!

Sink and Float

using base 10 blocks for counting

For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on properties of water.  We have explored density, surface tension and sink and float.  We have made boats out of wood, foil, paper and recycled items.  We have worked hard at sinking our boats with pennies or other heavy objects.  We have made boats in different sizes and shapes to see what worked best.  We have made hypotheses and drawn conclusions.  We discovered that foil floats if it is flat but sinks if it is crunched into a little ball.  We experimented with rocks and pumice, marbles and rubber balls, slices of bread and balls of bread and we even tried different sizes of pumpkins and silvers of pumpkin.   We learned that having a sail didn't make any difference when it comes to whether a boat sinks or floats.  We'll be continuing with our study of water for a while, we're not sure yet where it will go....maybe forms of water or uses of water? There are lots of possibilities!

The firetruck comes to Seabury!

We continue to work on math concepts everyday.  Now the children rush in the door in the morning and go straight to the math tables.  Circle time has to wait until after math and that's just fine!  We love that the children love math!  We are using the unifix cubes to count using one to one correspondence.  After the children had filled their graph using the cubes, they decided to measure the room with the cubes and then use measuring tapes to measure the cubes.  It took everyone in the class to build that long line of cubes and at least 10 measuring tapes to measure it all.  At the teacher inservice on Friday, I put out a plea for more cubes and viola! we now have enough to go from one end of the room to the other!

We had an unexpected visit from the firetruck when the Superstars invited us to join them one afternoon last week.  That was a lot of fun!