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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Plants Science Journals

We recently finished our plants unit for science.  We just adopted the National Geographic Series.  Beautiful pictures.  We planted six different cups with seeds. 


Crowded, Not Crowded, Sunlight, No Sunlight, Water, No Water



Then we recorded the plant growth in our science journals.  Turning the notebooks horizontally helped the children draw their vertical lines.  I walked around with a ruler and made the horizontal lines.  We had to wait several days to see any growth, but when we did we had a great time recording what we saw.  We made predictions on the previous page of our journal.  These are some of the pages.











Have a great Halloween tomorrow.  We plan to eat and graph our pumpkin seeds.  We will be using the  pumpkin seed graphing pages from The Inspired Apple....Thanks so much Abby for the freebie!  We also used the Pumpkin Observation Book from Bainbridgeclass.blogspot.  It is an amazing book and it is free.  So well done.  Thank you Christina.  My little kiddos Loooooved it.  I will post pictures tomorrow of both activities.   



















Sunday, October 16, 2011

Wow What A Weekend

I have attended Teacher Appreciation Days on a few occasions.  Most days they are on a Saturday which is my catch up on everything at home day.  However, this Saturday my daughter and I decided to go to the Barnes and Noble Educator Week Celebration.  They were having a drawing for a NOOK Simple Touch Reader.  After yummy coffee, cookies and picking up a few books in the children's section, I heard the announcement.... the drawing would take place.  Can you believe my name was called!!!!  AMAZING!  A huge thank you to Barnes and Noble.  We have been passing it around our house all weekend.  We love our new NOOK!

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Our Amazing Motor Lab

We are so fortunate to have a new OT Motor Lab.  In our state children are unable to get Occupational Therapy unless they are in another program such as speech.  We now have a new lab where we can take our entire class for exercises that build their core strength which is so helpful in their gross and fine motor skills.  The little ones have so many writing activities and for those that have difficulty with trunk strength it can be extremely difficult.  They become tired and frustrated.  Our wonderful OT teacher walked us through each station.  We started with two important exercises.
Don't break the Egg!
The children hold this pose for a count of 20 then rest for 20.
The Superman Pose. 
As you can see these two little ones had some difficulty.  Legs are supposed to be straight out just inches off the ground and arms straight out in front of you like Superman flying.  We do these two exercises right after calendar time.  Takes just a few minutes. 
When we go to the lab we do the following stations:  Trampoline, balance beam, scooter boards,  hopscotch, drawing a rainbow between two parallel vertical lines (their eyes must follow the drawing without moving their head).  I am so excited to see the results!