Kathryn Earns Her 10 Point AR Button!!

Fantastic reading, Kathryn!!

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Taya Earns Her 110 Point AR Button!

Super reading, Taya!!!

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Caterpillars!

As if candling eggs wasn't enough excitement for one day, you should see our caterpillars!  Holy mackerel are they growing!!  

This is what they looked like on April 16th:

This is what they look like today!!

Man, next year we are going to HAVE to do some measurement and some graphing with these guys!  That's a crazy growth spurt!

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Hoedown!

Selah, Kara, Thomas and Elijah

Kathryn, Logan, Taylor and Ana

Abby, McKenna and Peter

Darrin, Azariana, Tylyn and Tanner

Emily, Taya and Emma

Playing the tone chimes

Playing the tone chimes

Paying attention to Ms. Miller!

Playing chimes

Ana, Thomas and Darrin playing the tone chimes

The performance was awesome!
The kids have worked so hard on singing and learning instruments!

Thanks to Ms. Miller and all her hard work during Music!

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Candling Eggs

Today we candled our eggs to see if we could tell which might be developing into chicks and which might not.  We consulted our chart, which said we should see some red veins through the egg around Day 9.  In some eggs, we saw a smaller oval shape inside the egg that was all dark.  In others, we saw a couple dark spots, perhaps the eye and the heart, and they were moving about inside the albumen.  It was really exciting!!  In the end, we think we have 6 eggs with good potential to develop into chicks and 6 that maybe won't.  We marked these eggs with either a green or a blue dot so we can find out on hatching day (May 5th) if our predictions were right!  

This is a short video we took today with one of our eggs:

It took a little technical finagling, but we were able to record what we saw inside the candler.  Can you see the little black spots that are moving about?  

We will keep you posted!!

(We are really excited!!)

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Abby Gets 100 Addition Problems Right!

All that hard work deserves a Snickers!  Way to go, Abby!

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Blogging With the BUGS!

What are some things you are already doing to help save the earth?
What are two ways you can start to reuse, reduce or recycle?

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Blogging with the BUGS!

What did you learn this week from the book, 7 Habits of Happy Kids by Sean Covey?
What are some things you might do differently now that we've learned about these habits?

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Congratulations, Mrs. Stine!

We are so excited that our very own Mrs. Stine is being honored as a 2015 Educational Hero by Paw Paw Public Schools!  Mrs. Stine is an amazing paraprofessional and we are so happy she gets to work with us in Room 18!  Congratulations, Mrs. Stine!

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Taylor Earns Her 40 Point AR Button

Super job, Taylor!

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Stephene Earns Her 10 Point AR Button

Great job, Stephene!

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Ana Earns Her 45 Point AR Button

Awesome reading, Ana!

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Incubating

From Mrs. Butler's farm...

...to our incubator!  

We put a dozen eggs in the incubator this morning!
We watched all day to make sure the temperature came back up to 99.5degrees.
We marked the eggs with x's and o's so we know if we have turned them over each day.  

We are hoping for chicks on May 5th!!  

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How We Put Our Learning To Good Use!

The class had a mysterious piece of equipment awaiting them in the classroom this morning!  We took some time to make some scientific guesses in our journals and then Mrs. Koehn revealed that we are going to be incubating chicken eggs!  We are so excited to learn about the life cycle of a chicken with this hands-on science experiment.

None of us, as it turns out, has ever done this before (although Kara and Ana do have baby chicks at their houses right now!)  We weren't sure what to do.  We started by making a KWL chart (What do we already KNOW, what do we WANT to know and what did we LEARN?)

It turns out, we didn't know a lot.  

There seemed to be a lot of questions and details we needed to know before we got started. 

We decided to consult some books.

This one looked very promising.  With a chick on the front cover, we thought it would be pretty useful, but it turns out, there weren't many details about how to incubate eggs.  

We looked at this book next. We looked at the title and the pictures on the cover to see if it might answer some of our questions.  We thought it was worth a look inside. 

We used the Table of Contents to find what we were looking for.  (Eggs, page 100). 

This page had a lot of information about collecting eggs and the colors of eggs, but nothing about incubating eggs.  We decided to use another feature of nonfiction texts, the INDEX!!

Sure enough, the index had what we were looking for!  Incubation on pages 68, 70 and 71!

The picture on page 69 sure looked like we might be in the right place!

We used the heading on the page to confirm that this page was probably full of answers for us! 

Sure enough, we learned what temperature the incubator has to be set at, how many days to incubate and that we need to turn the eggs 2-3 times a day (Mrs. Koehn isn't too happy about that last bit - at least not for the weekends!)

We loved using what we have learned about nonfiction texts to find answers to our questions!  We can't wait to read more about chicks and chickens!

P.S. If anyone is interested in having any of our chicks that hatch (we are putting 12 in the incubator, no guarantees that any will hatch), please let Mrs. Koehn know!  We will be looking for homes for our chicks around May 7-8th! 

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Stephens Earns Her 5 Point AR Button!

Great reading, Stephene!!

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Blogging with the BUGS!

What will you do over spring break?

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