Earth Day Hats!

Are you looking for an activity to do with children that will provide some hands-on fun while you are having tons of Earth Day fun? I have the perfect project for you. Earth Day recycled hats are so much fun and a perfect way to show how we can use recycled materials to male something useful.

Overlay three or four sheets of newspaper on the table.

Place the paper on the head of your favorite Earth Day model.

Use masking tape to tape around the head.

Staple the pieces together.

Cut around the edges and fluff!

Admire your creation! Model and admire, admire and model.

Let the creativity begin!

The best part is that everyone can be dressed and ready for your Earth Day festivities and hats just make you feel so happy. And when Earth Day is over you have a super hat for your newly inspired Green Recycling Team!

Grab your Earth Day Poem and share the love!

And here is the link for free Earth Day Hat Decorations!

Visit me inside the classroom for a fabulous Earth Day video that you can incorporate into your festivities!

Look What Came To School!

We have been so busy working on non fiction writing, rock investigations and now soil. Just when you think the day will be just a normal day in walks a child with a box... I couldn't believe it! Ethan brought a turtle. The cutest turtle ever.

As you can imagine this brought so much excitement to our class today. Since we were already working on non fiction writing I wanted to see if we could use this experience to help us learn how to write non fiction. We had so many questions for Ethan about his turtle. We were all curious about how to care for a turtle because we were secretly wishing that Ethan would somehow just leave the turtle at school... We were able to get on the internet and jump right in to some great information about turtles. When we went to Writer's Workshop I decided to talk about using Thinking Maps as a plan for non fiction writing. I was pretty excited that we were all able to contribute to the Thinking Map and we remembered so much that we actually ran out of room. I was able to use our Thinking Map to show the class how to use this as a tool for non fiction writing and complete a writing piece based on our turtle experience. All in all, this really sparked some interest in non fiction writing and the class was eager to give it a try.

 This is what I had planned on using instead of the turtle to spark some non fiction writing. Instead we used our earthworms to really focus on setting up a worm habitat for our Science Center. I will admit this is my first experience with earthworms in the classroom and I have to tell you it was worth ALL of the three dollars that I spent to get them. We all were TOTALLY SCARED to lift the lid off the worm container but we did it anyway. I swear the room was silent as I pried the lid off. We all were expecting wiggly, squiggly worms just ready to squirm out but they were tucked right into the soil. The kids were fascinated by the worms and so was I. We all helped to set up the worm habitat and we used worm books to figure out how to do it. We will take pictures and show you soon. As you can imagine 19 kinder kids, 1 turtle, 1 new class fish, 25 worms and 1 teacher... the pictures were not so great!

Setting Up Rock Investigations!

Setting up rock investigations has been super easy and quick. The children were able to take this on and work independently in no time at all.

Each Science Team worked well together and explored the properties of rocks. We were able to determine that our rock collection was missing some rocks for some of our categories. We now were on a rock hunt. We were able to find most of the rocks outside on the playground. Our rock collection and our playground rocks have given us a nice collection to explore and investigate. We sent home the rock parent letter to help us collect the rest of the rocks we need for our investigations.

We even noticed that rocks have shapes and sometimes more than one shape can be seen on the surface. All these up close investigations have led to some great notebooking and wonderful descriptive writing. We will keep you posted on what we discover.

Don't Miss Out!

I am taking a break from all things related to dirt, worms and landforms. I wanted to share with you a great giveaway from The Posh Box. This giveaway is fantastic because if you win you will get a Ready2Go blog design for free. I have entered and entered and I have my eye on one of those blogs. Wouldn't it be fun to have a cooking or craft blog? With all those fabulous ideas out there it could be fun to blog about all things fun. For giveaway details click HERE.

Earth Day!

Source: google.com via Little Miss Kindergarten on Pinterest

I was thinking about Earth Day and remembered that I had written this with my kinder class last year. Earth Day was one of our favorite events that Kinder year. Just getting out this poem kind of got me a little misty eyed just thinking about my Earth loving kids. When I think of my class this year, I realized I have a FIERCE playground pick up crew, so I had to get this out for them. From my classroom to yours, I share it with you just click on the image above.  

Also, I remembered a free sorting activity that we did last year to help us learn about recycling. You can grab that here.