Welcome to the Kindergarten Pizzeria! 

With our short week, the Kindergartners took one day to celebrate all of our hard work with number sense, number recognition, and counting! When we walked into our classroom, we discovered that it had transformed into a pizzeria!
   This was no normal pizzeria! At this pizzeria, it was the Kindergartners' job to add all of the toppings- no more and no less than the order stated. 
    Using our recipe cards, the Kindergartners spent an afternoon creating pizzas galore. Mama mia! What a fun time we had practicing our numbers and exploring our imaginations!

With Thanksgiving approaching, the Kindergartners have been learning all about how the Pilgrims came to America and the first Thanksgiving. To practice our critical thinking skills and our engineering spirits, the Kindergartners were tasked with creating their very own Mayflower! Given only tin foil, the Kindergartners were given a task: create a boat that would hold as many "pilgrims" as possible. 
  Using our problem solving, creativity, and a lot of redesigning, several groups were able to successfully create a Mayflower that held all of our pilgrims without sinking!
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Towards the end of our pumpkin unit, we read the book Pete the Cat and the 5 Little Pumpkins. There was an opportunity to connect our literacy lesson to a STEM challenge, and we couldn't pass it up!
  Kindergartners were each given 5 "pumpkins" and were then asked to create a gate for them using 3 materials: clothespins, popsicle sticks, and Jenga blocks. The Kindergartners easily created several gates and were then given an even bigger challenge...create a gate/structure that holds a real pumpkin! There was building, redesigning, problem solving, and giggles galore during this great STEM challenge. We ended up with some truly amazing structures and the end and some very proud Kindergartners!

With our last "Mad Scientist Experiment" 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!