Our monarch caterpillars are eating a lot of leaves!  It's so much fun to hold their soft bodies in our hands.  We are always very gentle with our caterpillars.  They are living creatures and need us to take care of them.  Our caterpillars are yellow, white, and black striped.  They have two pair of antennae and "sticky" suction-cup feet underneath their bodies.  As they eat they make holes in the leaves and sometimes eat the entire leaf.  Every morning we clean the frass (caterpillar poop!) our of the containers and watch them crawl in our hands.

Someday we hope the will make chrysalides and turn into butterflies.

For more photos of our monarch butterfly-raising  project, please see our slideshow titled "2012=2013 Monarchs & Migration."

Stay tuned for exciting updates from the Nature Play area in our classroom!

A concerted effort was underway this morning to expand on the "single spinner" designs of the previous day. Take a look at the moving parts our friends engineered with simple snap-together K'Nex pieces, the exciting results of awesome peer-to-peer teaching and learning.  For more "2012-2013 Kindergarten In Action!" videos,  refer to the menu at the right side of our blog.

 

 

 

Kindergarten's first harvest from the Salsa Garden (planted by last year's kindergarten class in the spring) was delivered to Chef Allie the morning of our first all-school organic foods lunch.  We harvested bell peppers, red and orange cherry tomatoes, basil, parsley, chives, and oregano.  We saw our first grade friends on our way to the kitchen and showed them the produce from the garden.  A day earlier, Chef Allie visited the Salsa Garden with David and Matthew, now in first grade.  News from the garden will be posted to the blog and cataloged in our "2012-2013 Gardening with Kindergarten" slideshow throughout the year.  Enjoy!

 

Welcome to Kindergarten @ Friends School Haverford

A warm greeting and enthusiastic welcome to the 2012-2013 kindergarten class at Friends School Haverford!  Kindergarten will be an amazing journey for each of you and we hope, for parents and members of the extended family, too! Through the hands, hearts, and minds of your children and their experiences this year we hope you too will reconnect with nature more deeply,  relate with a renewed sense of playfulness in your lives, and be inspired by a sense of wonder wherever it may find you. 

We invite you to visit our blog for the stories, photos, and videos of our experiences together this year.  Photos will be added to a growing collection of slideshows found on the front of the blog in unedited, chronological order.  For a larger view of the slideshow or to download photos to your own computer, please double click on the slideshow bars to gain direct access to my Picasa Web Albums.

The slideshows to the right that feature photos from the first 8 days of kindergarten include:

2012-2013 Monarchs & Migration
2012-2013 Gardening with Kindergarten
2012-2013 First Days of Kindergarten
2012-2013 Kindergarten in Action!

We hope you are as excited as we are to begin the kindergarten year! 

Cheers,
Tr. Ann

Kindergarten learns about the water cycle and explores Mill Creek

If you were a drop of water, what would you do? Where would you go? How would you get there? Would you float about the earth in cloud? Would you hang out in a body of water such as a puddle, pond, lake, or ocean? Would you splash your way down a mountainside or through a valley with the help of a creek, a stream, or a river? Would you rest in the soil, quench the thirst of an animal, or become part of a plant as it grows? Would you precipitate? Turn to gas and evaporate? Perhaps you would do all of these things...

Tr. Lindsay read to us today about the water cycle and helped us play a bead-stringing game as we pretended to be drops of water moving through the water cycle. As we moved from one place to another, we had to roll a die to determine our destinations. As we moved from place to place according to the roll of the die we added a bead to our string from each destination visited. At the end of the game our string of multicolored beads was a visual representation of the story of our journey through the water cycle.

After that, it was off to the stream with our parent volunteers. We navigated our way upstream over rocks to an area with large puddles and shallow moving water. There we flipped over rocks and scooped up water looking for living creatures in the water. How lucky we were to see tadpoles today in addition to a few snails and mysterious creepy crawlies that moved too quickly to be captured and identified! Tr. Lindsay set up microscopes for us to magnify things we collected for a closer look; magnifying boxes were great for holding tadpoles while we looked for the appearance of emerging body parts.

The field trip stimulated our senses with the colors, textures, and sounds of the forest, challenged our physical bodies as we crawled over a fallen tree and scrambled over slippery rocks in the stream, filled our lungs with fresh air, and danced under a canopy of trees. Beneath cloudy skies and intermittent raindrops from the trees above, we stretched our minds to think about how water moves over land, changes form, and is a part of all living things. 

A warm thank you to our parent volunteers for joining us  today!