Autumn Greetings Dear Readers!
This evening, I have four top stories to report. Let me begin by sharing photos from this morning. We had just come in from our first visit to the Bookmobile (our local library on wheels) and decided to all sit down with our chosen books when the sun came pouring in the windows. It was a beautiful sight: peaceful, reading children in all kinds of places around the room.
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| in the "teacher chair" |
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| in a sunbeam |
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| on the floor |
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| in a doorway |
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| under a bookcase |
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| in a bathtub |
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My next bit of news is about our class visitor: the caterpillar. You do remember Myles found a caterpillar, right? And we brought her (or is it him?) into the classroom? And we fed her leaves?
Well...over the weekend she spun a cocoon! It is a small, light brown, hairball looking cocoon that is attached to the side of the cage. Today we did some research and compared butterflies and moths. We now know that this caterpillar will turn into a moth (not a butterfly) because moths spin silky, light cocoons whereas butterflies will form a hard chrysalis. We talked about many other similarities and differences as you can see from our venn-diagram below.
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| (sorry about the glare) |
Last Monday: This Monday:
Speaking of interesting discoveries, yesterday we found something amazing! It all started on our scavenger hunt. We were doing a nature BINGO where we were looking for shiny things, bumpy things, smelly things, listening for animal sounds, and so on. Here we are searching. Isn't the autumn sky a cool blue?
Suddenly, Brett came running out of the bush with a very strange object in his hand. It was a light green pod with little spikes. Brett told us it fell from the sky and hit him on the head! We were all very intrigued. When Brett put the little green pod in Ms Hadfield's hand, POP! the top burst open! It was very exciting. Inside the pod, there were four chambers. Three of the chambers had white seeds and one had a slimy brown thing that the kids said was probably a worm. Ms Hadfield tried to fish it out, but the sliminess of it all made her too frightened and Nic had to get it out. Thankfully it was a seed and not a worm.
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| What a funny little pod! |
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| The pod once it had opened |
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| the brown, slimy seed |
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| We planted the dark and light seeds to see if they will grow. |
When we got back to the classroom, Ms Hadfield did some research and was pretty sure we had found a Jimson Weed pod. It looked just like it on the outside. We learned that Jimson weed is very dangerous to animals and people if eaten and talked about why we never taste things we find on our walks. When we read more about Jimson Weed, we discovered it has tiny brown seeds. The pod we found, did not have tiny seeds. It had four pumpkin-like seeds. So, we kept searching. And good thing we did!
The little pod is most definitely a
WILD CUCUMBER! We still won't eat one if we find one again, but it's good to know we have such an wonderful plant right in our backyard.
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My final story is about our pine-cone jar you see below. Our main September goal was to listen to the person who is speaking. We tried our best to listen to all of the story, instructions, or announcement. We tried our best not to interrupt others. Each time we listened carefully, a pine-cone was put in the jar. We decided that when the jar was full, we would celebrate with cake. Today we also decided vanilla milkshakes would go nicely with chocolate cake
because we filled up the jar!
I better go take the cake out of the oven...
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| Congratulations K-3 on completing your first goal! |
Have a cozy week as the weather cools down!
~Ms Hadfield and crew~
