Our Chicks Need A Coop

Hello family and friends!

I'm happy to announce that our second clutch of eggs arrived this week! We were so excited to get this process started again. We've spent a lot of time preparing for them. Even though they have a few more weeks until their hatch date, we felt like it was important to learn as much as we can about them so we'll be well prepared for their arrival! This group is scheduled to hatch around March 29th. We've been having trouble keeping our incubator temperature regulated this time for some reason, but we're still hopefully that we'll have some chicks by the end of the month!

When our eggs arrived we decided to spent a little extra time exploring them. Our previous group arrived at the end of the week and it was important for us to get them incubating so they wouldn't hatch over a weekend. Thankfully, this group arrived on a Monday so we were able to spend time checking them out before the incubating started. We laid out the eggs in a bowl and encouraged the kids to spend time that day looking at them. They were given magnifying glasses and paper for documentation. We were happy to find that our eggs were several different colors! We have brown, blue, green, and a light red/pink color. We were also given paperwork telling us the variety of chickens in our clutch. We currently have 5 Easter Egger chickens, 1 Olive Egg, 4 Dominique, and 4 Salmon Faverolle. That's a total of 14 eggs! The Easter Egger lays blue and light green eggs, the Olive Egger lays a darker olive green egg, and the other 2 varieties produced our brown and tan eggs. We'll be spending next week exploring those different varieties. Wouldn't we awesome if at least 1 of each variety hatched so we could explore them further?!

We've not only been studying chickens, but also eggs. We thought it would be fun to a do strength test with eggs. How strong were these things? Some of us were surprised to read that it's difficult for a chick to escape the egg. Many thought they were not strong (I'm guessing because it's so easy for us to crack them). To do this, we put down a square piece of clay and put one egg in each corner. We took guesses as to how many books we thought our eggs could hold. Most of us thought it would only be 1 or 2. We carefully took turns stacking books up one at a time on top of our eggs. We were amazed to get past 10, 20, 30 books...it took 70 books before our eggs cracked under the pressure! This activity had everyone on their toes. Every time a book was placed on our eggs, they just knew it would be the last one. We were impressed by the strength of those little eggs. It has given us a better idea of how hard it must be for a small chick to break out of something so strong.

The majority of our week was spent making a chicken coop for our new arrivals. We've been reading about chicken houses in some of our books and even found pictures online. We saw that coops are made out of a lot of different materials, mainly wood, plastic, and wire. We've also learned the importance of these homes. They serve to protect chickens from bad weather, protect them from other animals, and provide them with a safe place to sleep,nest and lay eggs. We thought our chicks might need a little coop of their own. This will be a great place for them to run around and play in. I wish you could have seen this in action. The kids got SO involved in this building activity. They looked through pictures for ideas and spent one morning brainstorming all their thoughts. After we had our ideas gathered, we went to work. We had tons of cardboard boxes (thank you for the donations!) and made sure our art center was loaded with supplies. We really just stepped back and let the kids go to work. This coop was designed by the kids and really all we did was give some guidance on where we might need tape to keep the walls upright. They did all the taping, folding, and decorating. I'm so impressed with not only their ideas, but their team work. They worked together to make a couch, TV, toilet, and even a back patio. Seriously, check out the back patio...they had that thing attached to the coop before I even realized that was an idea they had! This thing is their baby and I'm so proud of them! We are planning to keep it on display until our chicks arrive. After that we will make room for it in the classroom and allow the chicks to spend some time running around in it. Here were some of their brainstorming ideas:

Shlomo: a cage for the coop
Taliah: a fence and a dish for food and water after they play
Maddie: a hold in the roof for us to see inside and check on them
Sally: make it look like a barn
Rand: big open area for them to run around in
Scarlett: stickers to decorate the coop with
Kayla: a sign on our coop so everyone knows what it is
Van: a bed for the chicks with a blankets and pillows
William: keep the coop next to their cage so they can go back and forth
Max: a door and a roof
Ethan: put the cage under the coop

To finish our week, we concluded our egg experiment from last week. We noticed that our egg soaking in the water didn't change but our vinegar egg looked very different! There was no longer a hard shell and the color had changed to yellow. To test our experiment conclusion, we poked the egg and felt it in our hands. We noticed that even though there was no shell, it was soft and felt bouncy. We learned that the acid from the vinegar dissolved the calcium in the hard shell.

We're excited to learn more about our chicken varieties next week! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Love,
Ms. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas
• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.  
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Recall some details in stories read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Explore books independently.
• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Locate patterns in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
• Associate time concepts with a clock.

Exploring our eggs before we placed them in the incubator...

 

Studying the strength of eggs with books...

 

 

We are builders! Check out our awesome chicken coop...

 

More Chickens!

As many of you have probably heard, either from Ms. Rachael’s email or from your children, our incubator was accidentally unplugged and we will have to start our egg exploration all over. We have still kept up our study of chickens but are waiting until our new order arrives early next week before we start our BIG exploration on different breeds of chickens. When our new eggs arrive we will find out what type of chicken each egg is, then let each child pick their favorite type, and do research on it.

To start off our week we let the children make little chicks and eggs with Play-Doh in art. Ms. Rachael and I thought that the Play-Doh would dry and harden so we could display them in the hallway but unfortunately it didn’t work out. We still had a blast playing with the Play-Doh and developing our fine motor skills and creating beautiful artwork.

This week we spent some time in writing workshop. We encouraged everyone to write a story about either a chicken or an egg and to draw a picture to go along with their story. We put on soft music and let everyone go to work. I was so impressed with all the detail they put into their writing and was so excited for each and every person when they presented. We all had beautiful pictures and either written words or sentences.

We started an experiment this week that I know everyone is super excited about! We placed one egg in a cup of water and another in a cup of vinegar. Then made prediction about what would happen to each egg after one week. If you haven't heard of this before, the acid from the vinegar is supposed to react to the calcium of the egg shell and dissolve the egg shell. After a week, it will leave a rubbery bouncy egg. We got some great guesses about what would happen to our egg after one week. Some guessed that the egg shell would disappear. Others guessed that it would crack. We even had some guess that it would make the yolk inside the egg go away or that nothing would be in the egg shell at all! On the second day we checked the egg and noticed that the outer part of the shell was floating around on top of the vinegar and the pieces floating around were no longer hard and starting to disappear. We cannot wait to see what happens when we get back from the weekend and next Thursday everyone will get the opportunity to touch the egg and make conclusions about what they smell, see, and feel.

On Friday we played games using new words we have learned throughout the first part of our chicken exploration. Here is a list of some of the vocabulary words we have learned:

Egg tooth- “a bump on the chick’s beak that helps them get out of the egg” (Van)

Wattle- “a red thing on the bottom of the chicken’s beak” (William)

Hatch- “when the chick breaks out of an egg” (Harry)

Coop- “house that chickens live in” (Mariano)

Rooster- “a male chicken” (Shlomo)

Hen- “a female chicken” (Ethan)

Chick- “a baby chicken” (Kayla)

Incubation- “to keep the eggs warm so they can hatch” (Scarlett)

Albumen- “the white part of the egg that the chick eats when he’s inside of the egg” (Sally)

Yolk- “the yellow stuff in the egg that helps the chick grow when he’s inside” (Maddie)

Nest- “something the chicken makes that holds eggs” (James)

 

Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.  

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Recall some details in stories read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Locate patterns in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.

We are becoming chicken experts using our new game!

We love science experiments!

We are artist making our chicken and egg models...

We are writers in writing workshop!

 

 

Our Chicken Eggs Are Here!

Hello family and friends!

I'm happy to announce that we have officially started our exploration of eggs and chicks! We received chicken eggs and are hoping to have them hatched by next month. We were able to get them placed in the incubator last Friday so they've been with us for a week so far.  While we wait, we will be spending time working on some science experiments and doing a lot of research. It's safe to say that we'll be egg and chicken experts by the end of March! Everyone seems really excited about it and we've been checking on our eggs daily. It's important that the incubator stays at 100 degrees, so this has been a great opportunity for us to learn how to read a thermometer and explore numbers in a meaningful way.

To start off the week, we spent a lot of time with our books doing research. We researched in both large and small group settings. We read some books together and looked through them to answer questions. Our reading workshop this week was based around our chicken books. As the kids worked in small groups, they went on picture walks. As with our other studies, we spent time after our picture walks talking together as a large group and asking questions. This week we've been learning a lot about the incubation process. Before placing our eggs in the incubator, we looked at them together and talked about the journey our eggs will go on. We were able to use some books to see an example of what the chicks look like inside the eggs at difference stages throughout the 3 weeks of incubation. We've also learned about the importance of caring for our eggs, such as how to appropriately handle them and how to monitor their incubation. We have 11 eggs in there now so we're hoping to at least have a few chicks in about 2 weeks. They should hatch around March 11th.

We also made a countdown calendar for our chickens. Each day a student gets to mark through another day on our calendar as we get closer to the eggs "due date". Along with our countdown calendar, we made a chart of what chickens have, what they need, and what they give. This has given us the opportunity to talk about the importance of chickens, how we can care for them, and the benefits of raising them.

As we've been exploring our fertile eggs, we've also been talking about the fact that eggs come in a wide range of sizes and colors. We found some eggs of different sizes and compared them in a small group setting. We also spent some time talking about the different parts of an egg and a chicken. We cracked an egg open and learned that the yellow part is called the yolk and the clear part is called the albumen. We also learned that the chicks eat these things while inside the egg to gain nutrients and help them grow. Someone asked what was inside the yolk so we experimented a little by stirring the two parts together. We noticed that there was nothing inside the yolk and that when we mixed the two together, the albumen was still easy to recognize as it didn't mix as well as the yolk. As we cracked the egg, we also explored the shell. We noticed that it has a strong soft lining followed by the hard shell. We also noticed a small air pocket inside the soft lining. We learned that this is used to allow the chick to take it's first breath of oxygen once it starts hatching. We discussed that if our eggs do hatch, the chick will probably be very tired from the hatching experience. We also learned that they will come out wet and sticky but will soon fluff up and be covered in feathers called "down".

On Friday, we were able to spent some time with Mr. Brent's class, learning about a project they have been working on. The 2nd graders made replicas of homes in different countries. They each gave us a small presentation as we walked around and asked questions about their projects. The homes they made were amazing! It was great for the kids to get to talk with the 2nd graders and learn how they used different materials to make their masterpieces. It was a great experience for us and we were so happy to be asked to visit.

It's been a great first week of egg exploration and the excitement from the kids makes it even more fun! I'm looking forward to all of our exploring next week. I hope everyone has a relaxing weekend!

Love,
Ms. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Stand up for rights most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs and photographs in the classroom.
• Begin to use both pictures and text read aloud as cues to meaning of unfamiliar words.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Show one-on-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

We check on our eggs daily to make sure the temperature is correct...

 

We are researchers! We want to be ready to care for our chickens when they arrive...

We are scientist! We've learned a lot about the different parts of an egg and their importance...

 

 

We are musicians!

 

 

 Thank you, 2nd graders, for your awesome presentations!

 

Workshops

Hello family and friends!

This week we decided to spend time in all of our workshops. We have three workshops: reading, writing, and math. During reading workshop this week, we invited the children to play letter BINGO. We wanted to spend time focusing on letters because just like in other areas of development, children develop their letter recognition and phonemic awareness at different rates.  Our goal is not to force the kids into memorizing something that they are not ready for or interested in. Instead, we work to support them wherever they might be and help them learn in ways that are best suited to each individual need. In order to accomplish this we use BINGO because it’s a great way work on all the different aspects of letters, for example: letter recognition, talking about the sounds of each letter, and coming up with words that start with each letter.

During writing workshop this week we asked everyone “What is your favorite part of school?” We encouraged everyone to draw picture and/or write down their answer to our question. Ms. Rachael and I put on some quiet music and let the kids get to work, encouraging them to put as much detail into their writing as possible! After everyone had finish we gathered around in our circle so that everyone could present their writing to the class. Each child presented their journal to the class and explained what they drew and why it was their favorite part of school. This helps students develop social skill and public speaking skills.

Everyone’s favorite workshop is math! Whenever we tell the class we'll be working in math workshop, everyone screams in excitement! During math workshops we set up the room into stations. Each area will have a different activity that helps to develop a different math skill.  Ms. Rachael and I also set up areas with different levels of difficulty. We use a timer to let the kids know when it’s time to switch stations. They can go to any station they choose and make sure that they visit each one. As the students do the activities, Ms. Rachael and I walk around to help with anyone who needs assistance and also to challenge students to do things in a different way.

This month we have also started challenging students more during our morning message time. As you know, each morning we work together as a class to write a morning message on the dry erases board. This is one way for Ms. Rachael I to model reading and writing daily with the children. We have added the writing of the full date (February 18, 2016). The children use the calendar to help figure out each component of the date, week, and month to help spell each word. We have also started asking children to come up and circle site words, punctuation, and letters. This will get them ready for kindergarten when they will be encouraged to write their own morning message with Ms. Becky and Ms. Britney.

As many of you have probably heard we have been waiting on a special delivery in our classroom and it has finally arrived!!! We got our shipment of chicken eggs on Friday and we cannot wait to start our exploration. The eggs will be placed in an incubator for 21 days and we will study them and learn more about chickens as we wait for our little chicks to hatch!!!

Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment. 

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities, and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Explore books independently.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs, and photographs in the classroom. 

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Organize and represent data with real objects. 

We love BINGO!

 

Mathematicians hard at work...

 

Writing workshop is one of our favorites...

 

We Love Dinosaurs!

Hello family and friends!

What a fun week we've had in the Aalva class! We've been focusing on two main things: exploring more about dinosaurs and working on our Shabbot boxes. We feel like our dinosaur exploration is coming to a close as we have ran out of questions this week. If the kids decide they're still interested next week, we will definitely keep rolling with it. As for our Shabbot boxes, this is something we've been working on along with Morah Devorah. The kids spent time with her making challah bread, candle holders, and challah covers. It's everything they'll need for Shabbot! There is also a piece of paper inside explaining the items and the prayers that go along with them.

To start off our week, we began paleontologist! We've been learning about different types of scientists and their jobs when dealing with dinosaurs and fossils. We decided to pull the sand table into the middle of the room and search for our own fossils. We used the same dinosaur skeletons that we worked with last week since we already knew their names and some facts about them. We covered them with sand and provided the kids with sand sifters and brushes. They spent the whole morning digging through sand and brushing off their discoveries. I've heard from several of you that this activity was talked about a lot at home. We were so happy to hear that they enjoyed it and were extending their learning outside of school too!

One question asked at the beginning of our study was, what do dinosaurs eat? We found information about this from our books (thank you to everyone who brought in dino books for us to read!). We divided dinosaurs into 2 categories: carnivores and herbivores. We spent some time going through our books and talking about each dinosaur specifically. We focused mainly on what they ate, where the probably lived, and their size. We also pulled out some magazines and cut out different pictures of meats and plants. After cutting, we divided them into categories and then glued them to posters of the different types of dinosaurs. We learned that even though the T-Rex was the biggest meat eater, the herbivore dinosaurs were actually the biggest in size! Most of them dwarfed the T-Rex and other meat eaters. We also learned that many of these dinosaurs were extremely smart and used a lot of skill when hunting for food. We learned that most of the plant eaters had to be larger in size so that they could eat leaves from the tops of trees. The kids even turned some lunches into discussions of whether they were having a carnivore or herbivore lunch day!

Another big question the kids had was, why did the dinosaurs become extinct? We spent some time talking about the word "extinct" and "theory" and what they mean. We concluded from our readings that there are several theories as to why the dinosaurs became extinct. These included asteroids, the Ice Age, volcanoes, and a flood. Ice Age was one of the main theories we read about. We talked about the idea of the Earth becoming very cold and icing over. We discussed how this would effect all types of life, even our plants, trees, and bugs. We also talked about the way these changes would affect the dinosaurs. We put some dinosaurs in ice and froze them overnight. We then let the kids use tools of their choice to excavate the dinosaurs from the ice. It was basically a wet cold mess, but they loved it! We even saw some great team work. Some kids realized that certain tools worked better than others for chopping up the ice. When they were done, they were quick to share their strategy with others who were still working. Once we got our dinosaurs out of the ice, we figured out which type they were and discussed their size and food preferences. I apologize that I didn't get many pictures of this activity. It was a little messy and crazy! I wish I had though, it was the talk of the week!

We've had a really fun time exploring dinosaurs and we've learned a lot! I hope everyone has a wonderful long weekend!

Love,
Mrs. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, and events.
• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
• Participate in group life of class.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Develop friendship with one or two preferred children.
• Express fears and concerns to familiar adult.

Language & Literacy:

• .Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
• Contribute to small group or whole class dictation activities.

Mathematics:

• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Identify the positions firth through tenth using concrete objects.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.

Making delicious challah bread...

 

 

Exploring herbivores and carnivores...

 

We are paleontologist!...

 

 

 

 

Excavating our dinosaur fossils...