A Hoot of a Kindergarten Class!: week of November 9

Last week was our Clothing Unit.

To start off our unit we gathered information about what the students already know about clothes and recorded our ideas on a KWL chart.

Some things to learn about clothes if you are interested in this unit: What are the different kinds of clothes? How do people make clothes? How is cloth made? How do clothes get to be so many different colors? What special clothes do some people wear for their jobs? Who decides what clothes should look like? How do clothes get to the stores? How do our clothes compare to clothing in the past? You can see above what my class wanted to learn.

One of our projects:

Students chose one article of clothing from one of the categories we discussed and drew a picture of it. Then cut it out and taped the drawing to chart paper.

We also described the colors, styles, and textures of different clothing worn to school one day.

Questions I asked: What do you notice about these clothes? How are some of the clothes the same? How are some of them different from the others? How did you decide which clothes to wear to school today? What do you notice about the materials from which the clothes are made? What are your favorite kinds of clothes? Why?

I asked the students how they wanted to graph their clothes that day. They decided as a group to graph them by color, so that's what we did.

Another day we read clothing labels to find out where clothes were made and locate on a map. This was especially fun to the students because they liked to see who was the closest to home and who was the furthest. (Grady was closest ;) )

We also read the clothing labels and made a tally to see what our clothes were made of. A lot of the students had never heard of polyester and thought it was a funny word. Ms. Angie said she could tell we had been studying about clothing materials that day because she had been hearing a lot of discussion going on at the snack table that day. :)

In our research, we learned that plastic bottles can be recycled to make polyester when we watched this video. How cool is that?!
Fun fact: One of the most famous pieces of polyester clothing is the white suit worn by John Travolta worn in the movie Saturday Night Fever. It sold at auction for $145,000.

Our new math game is called Bean Out. The students took turns rolling a die and would cover the amount of dots with a counter of their color. If the number was already covered, their turn was over. Once the board was covered, they would count their color of counters to see who won!

We also finally got around to graphing our Cheetos Bag of Bones from Halloween.

Better late than never, right?!?!

Anywho, Cheetos makes this great bag of skeleton shaped Cheetos each year for Halloween and I made up a graphing sheet last year to go with it. I pass out a handful to each student in a Ziploc bag and they have to graph what they get before they eat the pieces. There are hands/feet, rib cage, arms/legs, and skull pieces. :)