This week, we have spent our science time studying pumpkins. We began our week by reviewing the lifecycle of a pumpkin. Then we broke into groups and examined our cute little pumpkins. Each group had to estimate how tall, big around, how much their pumpkin weighed, and how many seeds were inside of their pumpkins. After each group discussed and determined their estimations, we gathered materials needed to measure our pumpkins.  We used yarn and linking cubes to measure the circumference and height of the pumpkins. I cut the top off of the pumpkins and the students dug out the seeds and grouped them into 10's to make counting easier. It was a fun and messy experiment!   

Now that we have all adjusted back into the routine of school, we have been enjoying our learning. At St. James, we are so blessed to be able to learn with our hands. This is exactly what we have been doing while learning about parts of speech. While this has been a review of what we learning in Kindergarten, we decided to go a little deeper in understanding exactly what is a noun. So, we went on a noun hunt. We walked all over our beautiful campus and found nouns. We were on the hunt for people, places, and things! It was wonderful to see all of the nouns that the children spotted, we could have spent hours on our noun hunt. After we filled our papers full of nouns, we headed back to our rooms to illustrate our findings!

Welcome back! We have just begun a new year here at St. James Day School. There is a lot of excitement going on in our first grade classroom! We started our school year in a memorable way, with a solar eclipse. Luckily, our head of school ordered eclipse glasses for our whole school. We also made and decorated paper plates to put the glasses through for extra protection. This was such a neat way to start our year and we also got to enjoy a popsicle after it was over! Our class has also really enjoyed getting to be in the lower school building this year. I think our class' favorite room in the building is the science lab. We get to go in there and get our hands a little dirty! Our first unit that we are studying is matter. We have done a few neat experiments to teach us a little more about matter. We got to read the Dr. Seuss book "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" and make some of our very own oobleck, which changes from a solid to a liquid right before our eyes. Then we also did a neat experiment where we took baking soda, a solid and mixed it with with vinegar, a liquid to create a gas that blew up a balloon. It was so interesting that we did it three times! I know that our class is looking forward to more time spent in our science lab learning this year!