October Fun!

When you step into the Whales classroom, you see artists, scientists, authors, mathematicians, and team mates. The last two weeks the Whales have been finishing up their apple unit of study. The Whales picked apples from around our piazza apple trees, and worked with partners to do some scientific investigating. Whales cut open their apples and made observations. Some Whales noticed that they had worms in their apples, other Whales noticed that their apples had more seeds compared to other apples in the classroom. The Whales made the noticing that every apple that we cut into was different in its own way. The Whales have also been working on finishing up their Matisse apples using concepts of light, and shadow.

Thanks to the help of Mr. Derek (an Otter dad), we collected enough apples to make a large batch of apple sauce. The Whales worked as a team to chop up the apples for the apple sauce. The apple sauce cooked all day in a slow cooker, and the classroom smelled of fall spices. At the end of the day, the Whales used their senses, and described what the apple sauce smelled like, tasted like, looked like, felt like, and even how it sounded. The Whales said the apple sauce tasted sweet. They noticed that the apple sauce looked chunky, and wet. We also noticed that it tasted DELICIOUS! To see more of the words the Whales used to describe their apple sauce, take a look at our apple sauce senses chart next to the nature table in the Whales classroom. A huge thank you to Ms. Colette for helping the Whales chop up all those apples.

This week to celebrate Pumpkin Day, the Whales began their unit of study on apples. Friday morning Whales got to explore many different pumpkin activities. At our engineering carpet Whales used magna-tiles to make strong structures that could hold up pumpkins. At our story telling table, Whales told pumpkin patch stories. Whales created scientific illustrations of some of our sugar pumpkins. They included the small details that they noticed on those pumpkins. At our literacy table, Whales created VCV words, sounded out each sound, and blended them together to read the word they made. At our mathematics table, Whales practiced counting and writing the missing numbers. At our nature table, Whales used magnifying glasses to observe the different types of pumpkins. They noticed that some pumpkins have bumpy skins, and others have Smoot skins.

On Friday, we also had many visitors in our classroom. A big shoutout to Mr. Cody for being our Mystery Reader. The Whales had a blast listening to a story about a bear and a ranger. The Whales got to end their day with a trip to a library, and some treasured reading back at the classroom. A thank you to Ms. Katie, for assisting the Whales to the library and helping Whales find some spectacular books.

The Whales are looking forward to investigate more about pumpkins in the coming week!