Uu is for underground

Uu is for underground: This is a letter I've been delaying for a while, because I needed to have my ant farm and my root-view box ordered and plants growing.  My timing was off.  I received the ants on the Friday of the beginning of our Thanksgiving vacation.  That means that the Monday classes saw the farm on day 10 and the Tuesday classes saw it on day 11.  A lot of the ants died :(.  Plus, by the time they saw the farms, the tunnels were done being created.  Oh well.

Here are pictures of the farm and below those are pictures and descriptions of what else we did last week.

This ant is cleaning himself.

The root-view garden allows us to see our root plant (radishes, onions, and carrots) growing above ground and underground.  So far, we only see the white roots of the radishes and on carrot.  The onion seeds never sprouted.  Here are some pictures:

One of the centers was sorting animals and insects:

The other center was free play -  to expand their socialization.

The two letters we worked on this week were the lower case "w" and the lower case "z".

Our art project was a two part step - basically two art projects done in one day.  The first part was to glue paper flower parts onto blues construction paper.  The second part was to roll a marble dipped in white paint across black paper that was folded in a way that showed the roots of the flower.  Enjoy these pictures (there's a lot):

The Friday classes used the sound science kit.  We listened to blocks that had something in the middle, different sized bells, a tuning fork struck on the table and then on a bell, and funnels attacked to a tube.  Here are some photos:

One of my students had a birthday this week.  Here are some pictures showing our celebration:

**This coming week, we'll focus on the phonics of the letter Ll and the theme: leaves.