We love Ms. Kraal!!

This is our amazing banner that the class made for Ms. Kraal! We are so lucky to have such a fabulous librarian! At the end of the day today, those who were still at school carried the banner as part of a celebration of appreciation for Ms. Kraal.

Hands, Feet and Letters

Today we began creating a HUGE poster of appreciation for someone here at Zilker. We took turns stepping in paint, with our bare feet, and walking on the paper. We also dipped our hands in paint and made a lot of hand prints. During Handwriting Without Tears, we sorted items by what beginning sound they had. We worked on the letters N, B, J, and L.
K. Parsons

There were bees and ladybugs flying around our classroom today! We've been working for three days on making ladybug and bee outfits and we finally finished them this morning. What fun!

Happy birthday to Ms. Parsons! And check out our spiders...they really can go up the water spout!

Monday we talked about the Texas state flower and made cotton ball bluebonnets that are now blooming in our garden. Today we started our water spouts and spiders. We used two paper towel rolls and egg cartons to make our water spouts and spiders. We will finish up tomorrow, adding spider legs and a web to attach them together. We can't wait to use them to sing along to the "itsy bitsy spider" on Thursday! This afternoon we practiced the letter "z" and sung "tap tap" with our big lines. Don't forget to keep an eye on our garden...a flowering shrub grew today!

What a fabulous Friday! We finished our grasshoppers by adding beads and pipe cleaners for antennae, bending pipe cleaners for their legs, and gluing on googly eyes. Our snails turned out great, too, with their pom-pom bodies and pipe cleaner antennae. Oh, and there were twins in our classroom rocking their Zilker Panther shirts. Hope you all have a fun-filled weekend!

Today was filled with grasshoppers, snails, and butterflies. This morning we used water paint make colorful butterflies. We also painted clothes pins green to start making our grasshoppers, used modeling foam to roll out worms and then coil them to make our snail shells, and used shaving cream to make letters and clean off our table! Keep an eye on our growing garden as we continue to add our creations!

On Wednesday, we went on a bug hunt! We walked through our garden and found roly polies, ants, and caterpillars. The caterpillars we found are Monarch caterpillars and can always be found on milkweed, which is what they eat. We brought three caterpillars and some milkweed back to our classroom to put in our butterfly pavilion. We can't wait to watch them turn into chrysalises and then into beautiful Monarch butterflies!

We had triplets in our classroom today! Three friends wore green and fit right in with our garden unit. To begin making our caterpillar, we rolled styrofoam balls in paint on big white parchment paper that had half of a butterfly outline on it. Tomorrow we will connect our colored balls with pipe cleaners and add legs to finish our caterpillar. When the balls were covered in paint, we folded our parchment paper in half and patted the paper so the paint printed an identical second half of our butterfly. Be looking for the caterpillar and butterfly in our garden scene tomorrow afternoon!

We're moving from the farm to the garden! Today we painted grass to start our beautiful green garden. We hung the parchment paper vertically so that we could paint using "big lines down starting at the top" just like we do in handwriting when we're practicing our letters. We read the book "Butterfly, Butterfly" and made a list of all of the things we want to add to our garden. We will be checking off our list as we make our creations. We also celebrated a birthday with ice cream and Pre-K friends this afternoon! Some caterpillars just might crawl through the grass tomorrow...

Check out our farmers watching over those chicks!

Today was a great start to the week. We painted chicks using a mixture of glue, shaving cream, and yellow paint to make "puffy paint." We also  finished our farmers (finally!) so they will be working hard on the farm taking care of those pigs come tomorrow morning. We chose our hair color and length, drew our eyes nose and mouth, and even added a pocket and buttons to our overalls. Be looking for sheep, cows, and horses to join the farm this week.