With our last "Mad Scientist Friday" before Halloween, the Kindergartners got to experience a spooky science experiment! They were given safety glasses, pipettes, beakers full of a potion ingredient, and a glass full of the other potion ingredient. After talking with their group about their predictions about what will happen, they went off to work making their potions!
    The Kindergarten room was full of ooohs and ahhhs as their potions grew, fizzled, and even changed color out of nowhere! Our Kindergarten scientists are becoming experts in observation, making hypotheses, and asking questions about why things happen!

 The Kinders were mighty surprised when they walked into our classroom after recess on Monday to discover that our classroom was attacked by spiders! The spiders had set up an obstacle course and game for us to play. The spiders were nice enough to lend us their superpowers by giving us each a spider ring, which helped the Kinders navigate the maze in our room. 
   The Kindergartners were challenged to work in teams to navigate the obstacle course, grab a card from the bags hanging from the spider webs, and then talk with their team to figure out what letter the picture started with. The Kinders were able to have their problem solving and reading skills challenged all at the same time! 
  This activity brought forth several wonderful conversations about letters, a lot of giggles when Kinders were trying to navigate the web, and teamwork that amazed this teacher! 
   What a day! 

One of our favorite parts of our day happens to be literacy centers! Each day, the Kinders rotate around to different literacy centers, practicing skills like letter recognition, rhyming, building words, fixing sentences, and even writing our own books! Our centers are full of choice, challenge, and a lot of fun! 
   Below are pictures of some of our center choices. The centers change and rotate each month so that we never get bored and they hold our attention. We are even reading words, building sentences, and learning oh so much!

This week, we learned all about our first fall animal...bats! One thing that we learned was that bats have amazing senses of smell and hearing and we decided to test it. Using our super sniffers (along with 1 qtip dipped in a diluted extract), we were challenged to find the other members of our "colony" and group together. 
   After that, the Kindergartners then had to try and figure out what scent they were grouped by! It was a mighty tricky challenge but each group discovered that they had super sniffers. They were able to not only figure out which colony they belonged with but they were also able to get really close to distiguishing the actual scent that they were grouped by! This activity led to an amazing collaboration between group members, problem solving in order to discover which scent they had, and a whole lot of laughs!