This week in Kindergarten

A lot has been happening in Kindergarten this week. The little scientists were again conducting an experiment - this time they were looking at shadows and they were all super inquirers. We also had our fabulous guest speaker Ms Leigh come and talk to us about light and different ways we can use it. We made fireflies and stain glass windows, our buddies drop in to say hello and we got to have shared play with all the other children from Kindergarten!!

So let's start at our shadows experiment:

We followed the same process that we did for our bubbles and sunglasses experiments. We were investigating into shadows so we made our cool little "tin foil people"

The children did the rest.....

We got into pairs and thought of a question for our investigation:

Ms Kelly wrote up the two questions we all decided on.

Then we went back with our partner and did another - I think, I wonder..... we had fabulous ideas!!

So we conducted the experiment....unfortunately the sun decided to hide form us on more than one occasion!! The children knew that we couldn't make shadows without the sun so we thought of ways to get the clouds to move. Some did a sun dance, while others crossed their fingers and toes and others just waited for the right time. Who would have thought in sunny Cambodia we would have a problem using the sun!! In the end we finally managed to do all three experiments.

Take a look at the process:

We went out 3 times - morning, noon and afternoon.  It was so interesting to see what happened to the shadows!! The children recorded the results by tracing the shadow of the "tin foil person" and colouring it.

As a whole class we recored the results:

Then with our partners we recored what we learned:

It was such a fun experiment and we shared our learning with the whole class.

Guest Speaker

A very big THANK YOU to Ms Leigh we came to share her knowledge of light with us. She showed us many ways to use light during a production and how different lights and colours can change the way we see things. 

 

 

I think our favourite light was definitely the black light:

Stain glass windows and Fireflies

This was another highlight of the week. The stain glass windows look fabulous and we were able to see which colours allow for light to travel through them. We noticed that light colours allow more light and look brighter, where as dark colours blocked the light more and looked darker.

The fireflies looked amazing.  The children were so excited to make them after reading the story "Fireflies" and discussing it.  They filled in information about the story starting with what was happening in the beginning of the story, the middle and what happened at the end. They all did a very good job understanding the story and could recall the information.  Then in small groups we made the fireflies in a jar.

Take a look:

Buddies

On Friday our buddies came to see us and we spent time on a great app "Show Me." The buddies are a great help to the children and they spent this session discussing and making a plan for a story that they are going to create. Our buddies also introduce the Kindergarteners to another fabulous app called "Scholastics - story starters" that helped give them ideas about stories if they got stuck. You get to spin a wheel and it gives you lots of options to get you started. Once the stories are complete we will post them on the blog for you to see.

Shapes, Shapes, Shapes

In Maths we have been using non-standard units of measurement, we used our hands to measure ourselves and our shadows. First we drew around our hands, decorated them and then cut them out. In pairs we measured how many hands tall we were. Then we drew around our partners shadow and measured with our hands the shadow to see if the shadow was the same length as we were. Just before lunch we found our shadows were smaller than us but some of the children said they would like to do it at different times to see if there is a difference in size. What great inquirers!! We also spent lots of time exploring shapes and numbers. Here is one of our fun songs we use for skip counting!!

Whatcha' Gonna' Do - count by 2s, 5s & 10s

Take a look:

And finally we ended a very busy week with free choice time in both Ms Ishbel's and Ms Sara's room. It was great to see all the Kindergarteners together and playing with lots of friends.  

Have a great weekend everyone and I hope you all received your invitations to our "Night of Light!"