Practicing Writing Non-Fiction

We have spent some time learning about space this year.  One of the activities we did was to write about what we've learned.  It was a good way to practice writing non-fiction.  We worked together to write these paragraphs:

March Madness Winner!

We have a winner!  But before we go to the championship match, we narrowed it down to these five books:

 I can't believe this book beat The Pigeon Needs a Bath!

Five worthy books, but we can only have one winner!  It came down to Somebody and the Three Blairs and The Book with No Pictures.

Both of the books were hands-down favorites in the semi-finals, and one book continued on the winning streak.  The Book with No Pictures is this year's winner of March Madness in our kindergarten class!  I can't say that I'm surprised!  I'm lucky that another teacher tipped me off to this new book.  Will it become a perennial favorite?  I have seen students pick the book before any other during reading to self time.  We'll see!

Butterfly Surprise!

We had a spontaneous lesson about butterflies when our eagle-eyed Oliver found a black, fuzzy caterpillar on the sidewalk one afternoon.  It was at the end of the day, so my sons, Noley, and I made a caterpillar habitat for the creature. It's kind of hard to see the caterpillar in our habitat, but look to the lower right-hand corner.  He's black with a little bit of yellow.

Imagine my surprise when I came in the next day after finding the caterpillar to find the caterpillar already had created his chrysalis! This life cycle was moving quickly!  It was hard for me to capture the image--the chrysalis looks similar to webbing here.

Since I knew we were going to discuss life cycles with chicks and ladybugs, I decided to introduce the concept with butterflies.  We used Pebble Go for our research and we made a class thinking map to keep track of our learning.

Then we worked in teams to illustrate each stage of the butterfly life cycle and then put the cycle in order.  I was able to get a few pictures of most of the teams.

Then we brushed up with our non-fiction writing skills we've learned this year and wrote about butterflies.  Our target was to have a topic sentence, at least three factual sentences about butterflies, and a conclusion.  We did it!  I don't have a picture of that, but the pieces are hanging up in our room. We decorated our writing with art work we made earlier--symmetrical butterflies. We managed to get science, reading, writing, and math in this one project!

I was surprised again when a chorus of students called me over to the habitat on Friday.  The butterfly emerged from the chrysalis!  The weeks went fast!  We knew the wings needed to dry out, so we took the habitat outside so that the butterfly could be on its way when the wings were ready. Here are a few pictures we got of the butterfly before the wings were ready.

We didn't get to witness the butterfly finally flying away, but we're excited to think about his new life as a butterfly.  It was a great way for us to start learning about life cycles!