Gingerbread Part 1

It has been gingerbread, gingerbread, gingerbread this week!

We have read about gingerbread men, gingerbread girls, ninjabread men, and even gingerbread cowboys!!

        

Students loved making connections between the books we were reading and looking for all the ways these books were the same and different!  If you are at the library or bookstore this weekend, try looking for some gingerbread stories.  Have your child tell you how your book compares to the ones we have been reading at school.  Or...you could always pick up one of the classics and have your child practice retelling the story!

Reading about gingerbread was lots of fun, but we didn't stop there!  We used what we heard the authors of our favorite gingerbread books do to begin creating our own gingerbread stories with a beginning, middle, and end!  We had ninjabread men, gingerbread cowboys and cowgirls, gingerbread miners, and underwater gingerbread men.  They were very cute and very creative!

 

  

We used gingerbread men to help us practice counting and numeral identification.

And we decided to help that poor gingerbread man find a better way to cross that river.  Our gingerbread men didn't need to rely on a fox--they had a boat!!  (The water looks icky because some gingerbread men didn't quite make it!)

We counted to see how long the gingerbread man lasted on the float before sinking!  Check out our data!  (We just stopped counting at 50.)

You know we couldn't go all week without tasting gingerbread!  

Here's what we thought were the best bites!

Stay tuned for more gingerbread adventures next week!

In the meantime, check some of these links for more gingerbread fun at home!

The Gingerbread Man
The Gingerbread Girl
The Gingerbread Cowboy

Thank you to everyone who donated materials for all our gingerbread fun!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a great holiday!!  

In case you are missing your turkey time, here are a few pictures to take you back! 

Pumpkins Part 2

Kindergarten has been all about pumpkins for a while--we even took a great trip to the pumpkin patch!!

 So after lots of research and real life pumpkin experiences, we tried to get our pumpkins moving!  We have lots of experiences with pushes and pulls.

So moving our pumpkins with different types of pushes and pulls seemed like the obvious next step!  We finally decided that pushes were the best way to get our pumpkins moving!

Then we started thinking about that thumpin', bumpin' runaway pumpkin that we read about in The Runaway Pumpkin.  The students and I worked together to create a ramp to roll pumpkins.  We looked for ways to make our pumpkins roll faster and farther, and we were even able to use what we had learned about gravity from our marble paintings to help us make predictions and new discoveries.

After helping me to create a pretty great pumpkin ramp, the kids decided they were ready to try it out themselves.  Students worked in groups of four to create their own pumpkin ramps.  We talked, designed, created, and improved our way to some really cool ramps.

There was a lot of pumpkin moving, but we also did some investigating while our pumpkins were still.

We found out that not only do pumpkins sometimes look different on the outside--they can look and SMELL different on the inside!

We also found out that pumpkin seeds can be different sizes and colors too!

(Sorry there's no pictures--we were all up to our ears in pumpkin goop, with no one to run the camera!)

And..you can eat the seeds too!  Just add a little butter, sugar, and cinnamon and you have a yummy pumpkin snack!

Most people agreed with me!

Pumpkins Part 1

October has been the month for pumpkins in Kindergarten!

We kicked off our pumpkin unit by reading my all time favorite pumpkin book--Spookley the Square Pumpkin!  Then we created some Spookley inspired art work and writing of our own!

We used lots of different shapes, colors, and patterns to create our pumpkin patches, and I think that we can all agree that sometimes it's better to be square!

We also began a new investigation that seemed to raise a lot of questions!

Check out the object of our inquiry!

                                     

Were these really pumpkins?  Could pumpkins really be different colors and sizes?

A little research helped us find the answer!

It turns out pumpkins can be tons of different shapes and sizes!  Some pumpkins are even blue!  We found out that that Spookley patch was a little closer to real life than any of us had thought!

We continued researching and found out more about how pumpkins grow and began creating our own teaching books to show the pumpkin life cycle.

Next we painted our own pumpkins (it may have been a paper plate) and colored sequencing cards to build our own pumpkin life cycles.

Be on the look out for Pumpkins Part 2 to see the finished product and even more pumpkin inspired learning!