Mushrooms, Noah's Art, and Writing Like Scientists

Last week, we began an integrated science and language arts unit about mushrooms. While learning about the parts, the life cycle, and the function of mushrooms, we are also learning about non-fiction writing. Children are being close observers, and doing their best to write what they see and know in their new science journals.

We've read a number of non-fiction books about mushrooms, which serve as mentor-texts. What features do we see in these kinds of books? Which of those features can we use in our journals? We have also watched some brief mushroom videos on line, as well as a gallery of beautiful and unusual mushrooms. Here's a beautiful representation of the mushroom life cycle.

In addition to our science writing, we also showed our observations in clay. Children made realistic mushrooms out of self hardening clay, trying to include all of the features we had learned about. Yesterday, children also had a chance to make imaginary mushrooms out of colorful sculpee.

In language arts, we have nearly finished our Alphabet Books. In addition to reinforcing hearing starting sounds in words and recognizing upper and lower case letters, this project also reinforces oral expression. Each day, children give clues to the class about a word starting with the letter of the day and the rest of the class tries to get their letter.

In Torah, we studied the story of Noah and the ark. Children have continued to add to their building Torah scrolls, and discuss their "wonderings" about the text. Our Hebrew unit ties into our Torah study - we've studied the names of animals, including cow, pig, dog, elephant, giraffe, zebra, and lion. This unit also gave us the opportunity to compare גדול large and קטן small and review body parts by making imaginary animals with the head of one animal, the legs of another, and the tail of another (and describing them, of course!) We've learned the song Old McDonald in Hebrew:

as well as a song about a rabbit who catches a cold:

We also reviewed the Hebrew names of colors as we painted a rainbow together with finger-paint.

In explorations, children continue to build, play, draw, and paint. Have you seen our "thread" paintings hanging in the hallway? These were inspired by the underground network of threads (mycelia) created by fungus.

Yesterday, I had the honor of presenting at the Eric Carle Museum's Educator Night. I gave a power point presentation about the annual Kindergarten Opera. It's already on mind, even though we don't begin  until after Passover.....