A Shape-ly Lunch

For the last week, we have been learning about shapes. In our math lessons, we have learned about the different sides and angles of rectangles, circles, squares, triangles, and hexagons. To incorporate Language Arts, we have read lots of fun shape books. Two of my favorites are  Shapes that Roll  and  The Greedy Triangle. These are great books that incorporate lots of different shapes. The Greedy Triangle is my very favorite because throughout the story the Triangle changes shapes by adding sides and angles and you see him out in the real world as those shapes. If you haven't read these, what are you waiting for?!

The students recognize shapes when we look for them on the math page, but it is important that they can recognize them in their day to day lives, so today we looked in our lunch for shapes! This was a fun way for us to look for shapes off the page. The children were asked to take out their lunch and then graph what shapes they found. This not only helped us recognize shapes, but reviewed graphing!

After the students graphed which shapes they found in their lunches, they had to write one thing about their lunch. This integrated writing into our activity as well!

 

Here are a few examples of what they found!

"My lid is a circle."

"My Cheez-it's is a square."



"My chocolate hills are triangles."

Stay Tuned for our Shape Hunt later this week!

Butterfly Finale!

 

 

  

  Monday we had quite a surprise!

 

   When we arrived, we noticed that  our caterpillars had completed their change!

 

We had four Painted Lady Butterflies!

 

 

 

 

 

The children were so excited!

 

I didn't mention it to them, but as they came in each one came over to check on them and the gasps and "Oh My Gosh's" were just too cute! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We completed our Observation journal. The children did a fantastic job being scientists and using  their eyes to observe our caterpillars as they changed.

They have continued to observe the butterflies each day- I love today when one student said "I see it drinking with its proboscis!" Way to remember vocabulary!!

Then we did an activity that integrated both science and math. The children were given several different animals and asked to sort them into different categories. The categories were hop, fly, and swim. We talked about how different animals move and compared the different ways that animals can move and thought about how our caterpillars movements changed over time. When they were caterpillars they crawled, but once they became butterflies they can fly and walk. We also talked about the kinds of movements humans can make and compared them to different animals.

 

 

After the students had a chance to sort their animals, we made a chart on the smartboard to check our animals. I love the inventive spelling!

Another fun activity that we did was compare and contrast Butterflies and Moths. We read the book Butterflies and Moths by Nic Bishop. Our Let's Find Out this week also had a great chart comparing the two. Afterwards, we worked on this graphic organizer together on the smart board. Graphic organizers are one of my favorite ways to recall information from a text. It is an especially good way to remember facts from an informational text. Here is a sample of what we came up with! Again, check out that great spelling!!

 

For those of you who are not savvy in K-1 spelling, here's the translation :)

Moths sleep with their wings open and fly at night.

Butterflies sleep with their wings closed and fly in the day.

Both start as caterpillars and have eyes and wings. 

Creepy, Crawly Caterpillars!

Last week we began learning about life cycles. As an example of a life cycle, we are going to be observing the life cycle of a Painted Lady Butterfly. Each day the students wrote in their observation journal, describing how our caterpillars changed over time. We read lots of great books about butterflies and learned many interesting facts about them. Did you know that caterpillars shed their skin? I have been doing this project for 7 years and I just learned that! Also, did you know that caterpillars taste with their feet? Pretty cool stuff!

Here is a beginning of the week picture of our caterpillars. They started out very teeny. We learned that baby caterpillars love to eat and move. They did both! They ate and ate and ate and were constantly on the move!

By the end of the week, our caterpillars had changed quite a bit! They had eaten almost all of the food in their container and had more than tripled in size!

By Monday, they had undergone quite a transformation! The children were so excited and surprised to come in first thing Monday morning and see that our caterpillars had made their chrysalides over the weekend!

Now we're just waiting for our wings! You can read more about this in this great book by the same title.

Grandma's Button Box

Last week we learned all about sorting. We learned how we could sort differnet objects. We also learned how to decide if objects belonged together in a group. As a culmination of all of the things that we learned, we read the story Grandma's Button Box. In this story, the grandchildren accidentally spill all of Grandma's buttons and try to figure out how to put them back into the button box exactly like she had them. They try many different ways to get them just perfect. The best part of the story is when Grandma comes home and tells them she didn't have them sorted at all! The kids went through all of that for nothing! It is a very cute story and a wonderful way to integrate language arts into math. I love reading the story and then re-creating it in our classroom.

After reading the story, we reviewed what it means to sort. Sorting is putting things with simliar traits together. Then we practiced sorting our own buttons! Each student was given a cup with a random sampling of buttons in it-- many different shapes, sizes, and colors.



We brainstormed some of the ways that we had sorted over the week and then sorted our buttons the same way.

 

 

              

             First, we sorted by size.

 

   

      

                Then we sorted by shape.




         

 

      
          
                     Finally, we sorted by color.

 

Then a few really crafty kids came up with the idea to sort by number of holes in the button!

 

 

After we finished as a group, I had the children pour all of their buttons out again and sort them any way that they liked to sort and explain to me how they sorted them. This shows me that not only are they able to sort the objects, they are able to classify them into a group and explain the sorting rule. This was a great activity to wrap up our unit on sorting and explore the different ways that groups of objects can be sorted. It was also a lot of fun!