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!