Music Around the World--Week 5--America

Wow! What an exciting day we had today at our fifth morning of our Music Around the World Club! Today we learned about our country--America! We focused on how Texans like to put a country twist on American favorites. After reviewing "It's a Small World", "Kye Kye Kule", and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, " we were treated to a special guest, Miss Todd's Dad, Mr. Todd. He played his guitar for us and sang, "Sneaky Snake", a song that he and Miss Todd sang together when she was our age.  After enjoying Mr. Todd's presentation, we had the opportunity to create string things, harmonicas, and washboards. We used these instruments to accompany our song, "You Are my Sunshine!" You can listen to our rousing rendition in the show we made below. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about our fun day!

Don't forget to join us on Thursday night, May 7th at 7:00 P.M. for our presentation of our Music Around the World Celebration Night! You are going to enjoy seeing all of the instruments that we have created and songs that we have learned on our musical journey around the world!

https://vimeo.com/393015555

Fun Run :)

What a fun day we had running in our school's Fun Run! With each lap that we ran, we earned money for our school, which we plan to use to help make some improvements around our school! I am so excited to announce that our class raised the most money out of the whole school! That's wonderful, and I could not be more grateful for your help and support! After the Fun Run, we enjoyed our movie reward and a super delicious snack. These are the prizes that we won from our fundraising efforts. Here is an exciting video from our day! Check out how much fun we had and leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

                                                          https://vimeo.com/393063865

Celebration Snack--Popsicles

Marvelous Math Stories--Addition

In math, we have been working hard to solve addition problems, using model drawing. This is the math program that they use in Singapore. Research has shown it to be very effective. Model drawing is a way for children to not only solve a story problem but to be able to prove why the answer is true. In order for our students to have a solid foundation in number sense, we find the ability to fully explain your reasoning behind your answer to be a very important skill. Model drawing allows our students the opportunity to practice doing this. Below you can see how we were able to solve problems that we created on our own using the model drawing strategies. 

Maker Tank Magic

Wow! I am not sure when I have ever been so impressed with our student's creativity and innovation! Our amazing children created inventions to solve a problem in their lives that has been bugging them. They researched how to solve this problem, created a blueprint for their invention, and then built the prototype and brought it to school. We presented our projects to our classmates and choose a winner to represent us at our school wide Shark Tank style Maker Tank Talent Show. Here are our friends' projects and our winner!

Catalina Garcia--No slip bag

Amazing Mazes

Our Watson Kindergarten students participated in a STEAM challenge (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) where they built mazes. They were grouped in partners and given popsicle sticks, 50 cm of painter's tape, and a pair of scissors. Then, they were allowed to be creative and work together to build the fastest maze with at least ten turns. We all started this challenge at the same time and completed this challenge without any adult assistant. I was impressed with their hard work and determination! There was a lot of critical thinking and active problem solving going on as they worked together to build their mazes. We have included some pictures and video from our challenge below. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about our mazes.

I am proud to announce that these amazing students were our STEAM challenge winners! 

Valentine's Day

This week we celebrated Valentine's Day! In honor of this holiday, we created the show below to express what love means to us. We hope that you enjoy it! Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

We also created a show from our Valentine's party and have included some pictures that highlight some of the fun activities that we participated in this week. We hope you have a very Happy Valentine's Day!

What is Love?

https://vimeo.com/391634130

Valentine Party: 

https://animoto.com/play/mrvTmH3n1X8FRSxJ4i337w

Sight Word Surprise

Valentine STEAM Challenge

Conversation Heart Sorting and Graphing