Guess who's back!

First off, I apologize for my lack of entries over the past few weeks. As many of you know, I am working on my National Boards this year. This has been an all-consuming task for the past 5 months. It consists of 4 huge entries and an exam. Each entry has very specific instructions and even packing the box has a long list of very specific instructions. While this has been a difficult task that has taken up most of my Saturdays, my Christmas break, and many days in between, it has been such a learning experience for me and has caused me to look at the things that I do in my classroom and try to find new and exciting ways to teach the curriculum to my wonderful kindergarteners. That being said, I mailed my box today!!! Now I just have an exam to take and to wait until November for my results.

Now onto my classroom!

Over the past few weeks, we have been learning about clouds. We learned about the different types of clouds and then we went outside to practice our observation skills. When I asked my children what it meant to observe, one of them said "discover". I love this definition! Each day, we went outside and "discovered" the clouds around us. We sat outside and the children were asked to draw the clouds that they saw in their Cloud Journal. If it was sunny, they should make their picture sunny. If it was rainy, their picture should be rainy. After we observed and discovered, we came in and looked at different pictures and decided what type of cloud it was and wrote that in our Cloud Journal.

Today, we read the book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, and I let the children go outside and do a little imaginative drawing. They observed for five minutes and then picked a cloud that they wanted to draw and drew it. Then we came in and they had to describe what their cloud looked like. We had ice cream, dinosaurs, and flying saucers! This was such a fun way to end our unit on clouds.

I hope the children have enjoyed going outside and observing as much as I have. There is no better way to teach science than to just get out there and experience it first hand!