This week the kindergarteners dove into nonfiction by learning all about the country of Japan. In preparation for creating their "All About Me" books, we created a whole class "All about Japan" book. Mr. Jeffrey is working on scanning the book and posting it to the web shortly. To Launch our study of Japan we created a "What we think we know about Japan" and a "What we wonder about Japan" poster. This helped us narrow in on a few areas of study that we wanted to focus on. The majority of the wonders fell into these 6 categories: Land, People, Food, Homes, Culture, and Arts. As we learned from books, pictures, and videos we always had these categories in mind. These categories made for very handy chapter titles in our "All About Japan" book. I can't wait for you all to see it! I also got the chance to share with them some photos from my trip to Japan with my family. I think they really enjoyed seeing myself in all the photos :)
We have also been exploring our new science unit on wood! This week we got the chance to conduct an investigation on how to sink wood. To start, we discussed what 'sink' and 'float' means by demonstrating with various objects from our classroom. Naturally, this was a great way to get them thinking about what makes objects sink or float. From there, we began experimenting to see how we could make the wood sink. They tried various methods and then I gave them paper clips and rubber bands as materials to use. Here are some video clips showing the different sinking methods that were proposed.
Our second literacy celebration was a hit! Thanks for coming out and celebrating all the amazing learning that is taking place. It was amazing seeing all the students showing off their talents to family and friends. Thanks to everyone who helped put on this wonderful event! Here are a few pictures I captured!