Groundhog Day!

Wow, we crammed a whole lotta groundhog into out day today! We had a lot of fun and our room now has some cute decor. Our day was almost ruined though when the music teacher began to announce Puxhataney Phil's prediction during our before school assembly! I had to quickly call out and let her know not to spill the beans so that it didn't influence any of our predictions and writing. She gave me a bit of a dirty look and told me that it was all over the news anyways, but fortunately (or unfortunately!) none of my kiddos listen to the news in the morning.

So, here's what we did today: we graphed our predictions (and of course I forgot to get a picture of it!) and we were 10-7 in favor of more winter. We watched a video of a groundhog whistling and then graphed how many students could whistle versus those that couldn't. We read "Groundhog Weather School" and timed ourselves holding our breaths for 1 minute (since groundhogs only breathe once every 4 minutes while they're hibernating) - it was hard to hold our breath that long! Here's the super cute groundhog peekers from Cecelia over at I love 1st Grade.

We also made these adorable groundhogs that are now gracing our back wall. This was an exercise in following directions (for them! for me it was more like an exercise in frustration!). The template actually said that the arms were the legs and vice versa, but when I was putting it together I accidentally flipped them and decided to go with it. My poor literal kiddos had a hard time believing that it was really going to turn out okay if we use the leg pieces as the arms! Oh, and I usually don't require my kiddos to color anything a designated color so we have quite a rainbow of woodchucks! I remember observing in a kindergarten class once when the teacher made a little girl redo a whole paper because she had colored someone's hair purple. Even though she had stayed inside the lines and obviously did her best, the fact that "Real people don't have purple hair." made the paper unacceptable! My tongue was practically bleeding afterwards, I was biting it so hard! So, anyways, here our are groundhogs which are from Leslie's TPT unit (Life in First Grade)

 Oh, remember I mentioned that our school got a grant to give the students a snack of fresh fruit or vegetables every Wednesday through Friday? We have been having so much fun with it the last two days! Each time we try a new fruit/veggie we look it up to see where it's grown, how to eat it etc, then we each draw a picture and write a few sentences about whether we like it or not. Here's the binder where we keep all of our opinion pieces:

 

Yesterday we had kumquats! Did you know you're supposed to eat the rind? Luckily our class had looked it up and could inform everyone else as the kindergarten teachers were trying to figure out how to peel 26 kumquats for their students! The rind is the sweet part while the inside is sour - think grapefruit. Here's one of our papers about it, this little guy was not a fan, although several others asked for seconds!

Today's fruit was Forelle pears. We learned that they originated in Germany and "forelle" means "trout" in German. Apparently the speckled color of the pear led to a comparison to rainbow trout! It is very small, which means it's generally only a snacking pear. It was firmer than most pears and sweet. My kiddos ate them down to the core! Here are two of the papers we wrote about them. Can you tell they enjoyed them?

Here'a picture of the pear and a kumquat side by side:

So, how was your groundhog day?