Mrs. Windom's Window: September Highlights...part 2

We usually start September reading stories by Eric Carle, especially The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This reviews the days of the week and counting. It also gives me an opportunity to introduce my favorite kind of art projects. These art projects are called TLC directed art lessons, here is a description from their website:

The TLC directed art lessons help children:

Learn to Follow Oral and Visual Directions
Acquire an Understanding of How Shapes Work
Develop Fine-Motor Skills
Strengthen Eye-Hand Coordination
Learn Color and Shape Recognition
Develop an Awareness of Spatial Relationships
Learn to Work Individually and Independently

Basically we start with squares and rectangles, no patterns, and we turn those shapes into other shapes, following step by step directions. We start out pretty easy with our caterpillars. We start with 7 squares and learn how to turn them into circles...cut off the corners and trim the points. Once we have all 7 cut, we start from the back and make a pattern with the light and dark green circles, and we learn to overlap. Then we add the red circle for the head and add the detail with out black crayon.

Here we have all of our caterpillars on the board. I always love how they are all different.

We also made our the backgrounds to our Johnny Appleseed directed drawings!

I love how these came out. They did such a great job with their first directed drawing! they even got to use a Sharpie to go over their pencil lines. Of course we had the "Sharpie Talk" first.

And speaking of apples, what kindergarten teacher doesn't teach about apples in the month of September?

We started by learning how to make a graph with all of the apples that we brought to school. We all just placed them on the graph at first.

Then we talked about how all of the apples should be in their own rows, sorted by color. We then talked about filling in the graph without leaving empty boxes in between on the graph so it is easier to read. Then we were able to identify which color had the most and the least and compare the different colors.

We then began our Apple Investigation page.

The best part was the weighing of the apples. We used one of our Science tools, the balance scale. Thanks to Mr. Phillips for loaning us a bunch of balances.

Of course we had to have a taste test, to see what kind of apple we like the best. I always do a graph with what they think is their favorite.

Then we do the taste test!

Then we make another graph to see if their choice has changed.

And of course we had to take the rest of the apples and make applesauce! Thanks to Emery's and Gia's moms for helping us with the peeling and chopping.

And of course we had to make a chart to see if we liked the applesauce!

But probably the biggest highlight of the month...we had our first performance! We had to move it to the cafeteria instead of the courtyard, but the children did a fantastic job and Mr. G got to play the piano!