We have actually seen more sun this spring than we did all of last winter and spring combined! We did have rain this week, thank goodness, since the water cycle was part of our lesson plan for preschool. Parents were amazed at how their four and five year- olds grasped the concept of the water cycle through the hands-on experiments that we did to represent the water cycle. You have to love the cotton ball as a cloud that sucks up the water and then the rain is represented when you squeeze the cotton ball. J The children loved watching their cups of water too to see if the water would really evaporate. It is so cool to hear them use the term evaporation when they are talking to each other!
On the other side of the water (not literally), kindergarten was
talking about animals that live in the water. Sharks and whales are usually a
topic of excitement, but there are lots of interesting animals that live in the
ocean and plenty of fun activities that you can do to include a variety of
them. Our kindergarten class did
research on an ocean animal and incorporated technology in their research to
present what they learned. Awesome!
Web Quest: The unit of study on ocean animals started out with a web quest and listening to Bart the Shark (Voki). The students were on a quest to find the information about their ocean animal and created their books. Some were published on Educreations and others on Simplebooklet.
I just made a new Voki. See it here:
Educreations Reports:
Some of the students were allowed to create their animal report on Educreations. Please excuse the pictures that are sideways. They did an incredible job considering it was the first time they were allowed to be fully independent on their creation!
simplebooklet.com simplebooklet.com
Simplebooklet Reports:
Under the Sea Pixie Slides showing what they learned:
Other activities:
Kindness Book of the Week:
iPad Apps:
We couldn’t decide
between these two books to focus on for our Kindness book of the week because
they are both so incredible. Fish is
Fish is a story that’s simply and wonderfully symbolic of how friends can
remain friends even when they change as they grow up. Swimmy is the story
of little fish banding together to scare off bully fish.
iPad Apps:
Youtube video:
Pictures of the waters in Lipsi (Greece)
Question: I noticed you use Pixie quite a bit. How do you use it?
ReplyDeleteHello! I use Pixie as an informal but fun way of finding out what the students have learned after a unit of study.
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