Wind and Insect Release

What a great day to start talking about wind today!  There were gusts of strong wind and some mild wind throughout our class time. We made kites, talked about the letter W and read books about wind.  We learned that wind is made by the hot air going up and the cold are coming underneath it. We played outside flying our kites and running around until the sandbox was just too tempting to stay away from.  We headed inside and learned all about dimes and practiced our songs for our upcoming end of year celebration.

This afternoon we started our day by observing and writing about our now full grown butterflies.  We completed our regular reading lessons and then headed outside to release ladybugs and butterflies.

 We had a great time watching them and holding them, catching the ladybugs again after they flew off our hands and trying to keep them from crawling down shirts, up pants or in hair :).  We spent tons of time with one butterfly who enjoyed a nice long snack of grape juice and everyone that wanted to was able to hold the butterfly on the grape.  It was wonderful!  I'd highly recommend cutting a grape in half and then scoring the inside to see if you can hold the butterfly for a while when releasing.  The other 3 butterflies weren't interested, so it may not work, but we had a good 10 minutes of passing around this one butterfly.

In math today we counted all the way up to 100, but we didn't count normally.  We said each number according to place value.  So we'd say "Six tens, three units. Six tens, four units." and so forth.  I even drew the unit house the tens house on top of the plastic on the hundreds chart occasionally.  I think we had a break through lesson today and I can see the place value number sense kicking in!