Fun with Words, Pie Charts and the Farm!

Hello families! 

The kids are so connected to the blog.  They are often suggesting that we put info on the blog.  I am usually able to do this more often, but this week has been a bit busy.  I hope the X-rays I had to go take will be a nice offering to show them as a sorry for having to wait so many days to show our work.

So this might be a big entry!!!

This morning, as we often do, we had some fun discoveries during our morning message.  We usually identify words we know, recognize or have sounded out and then spell them out loud.  This morning the friends found some interesting things about these words:

The friends have been looking in the words to see teams and now are seeing other words too.  For example they realized SOMETHING has SO, ME, THING and SOME in it.  And TOGETHER was making them laugh because it has TO GET HER in it!  Then Coco realized if you change these words around you could make GET TO HER!  Reading and writing can be so much fun when we take the time and look for nuances and funny things in our language.

We have also been having fun with a new type of graph.  Sometimes when we need to make a class decision we make a vote.  I love using these moments to pull out more thinking and learning.  Lately the kids have been intrigued by pie graphs.  They enjoy trying to read and interpret what the outcome is.  We also have been thinking about what information you need to put near a graph to help others know what it is measuring and what it means.  Here are two we did recently.  The first one was how we decided to use our morning on Monday and the second one was how we decided which games to play on a Friday afternoon before school was out.

We are thinking of elements such as how color can be used to make information more easily read.  Also, what is a solid title to best summarize the info the pie chart displays.  Fun and interesting, eh?

And lastly (only because this will take a lot of space...) our FABULOUS trip to the farm!  Tuesday we were able to go to the Van Ommering Dairy Farm in Lakeside and this was a very special experience.  It was very nice to see how the workings of a farm and the machines that are used to help us get our milk.  The kids were also interested in how the cows were grouped by age.  We were able to see a day old calf, to pet a baby goat and other animals, to see goats, llamas, alpacas, cows and pigmy goats, and to see what kinds of materials go into the cow's "cereal".  The farm is set up really nicely with lots of fun and interactive things to do.  I hope the kids told you all about it.  Here are some images I wanted to share- click on them to get a bigger version.  I hope you will have your child narrate them for you! (PS they are sledding on cotton seed, which is also the cows' source of protein.  This was a big hit with the kids!!!)

Also, if you want more info on how to make this a family experience, here's the farm's website:

www.omaspumpkinpatch.com

I really appreciate all the families who took time out of their week to make our fieldtrip possible, and to share the experience.  Thank you to Karri, Joelle, Heidi, Stephanie, Jamie, Lorraina, Gretchen, Sonia and Carolina!

Enjoy your week!  Love, Jennifer