This is a busy week for science. You students will get to present their pollinators and parts of a flower project to the first and second graders. They will explain how pollinators help plants grow and name the parts of a flower. On Friday, the high schoolers will demonstrate chemistry phenomena to the kindergarteners. They will get to participate in hands-on experiments and observe reactions.
At Westgate, we believe we have a duty to contribute to our community. To support this mission, each grade level has a service learning project, where they learn ways to create meaningful change in and out of Westgate. Kindergarten’s service learning project is all about pollinators! Throughout this year, kindergarteners have been exploring the importance of pollinators and what we can do to support them. This week, we are going to showcase all that we’ve learned with an interactive poster project. With these posters, student’s will be able to demonstrate how pollinators use the parts of a plant to survive and help plants grow.
During our short week this week, we will be revisiting the topic of “Then vs. Now”, but through a scientific lens. We use the growth of animals to observe how things change over time, and how to name the animal babies that we might see.
This week, we are starting a new 2 week unit in Science. We will be exploring how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs. To do this, we will be taking a deep dive into different animals (and then humans) to see how they change their specific environment.
This week in science, we will be exploring how the Sun heats up the Earth and how this affects animal habitats. To support our understanding, we will be doing experiments to test how the Sun heats things up and learning about how the Sun affects three different animal habitats.
We are learning all about what animals do in the winter in our classroom! We will be exploring what animals hibernate, migrate, or adapt in the winter and what they do to survive.
What can you do at home to support your kindergarteners? Learn about animals in the winter at home. Go outside or look outside from a window. Listen and look for animals! What animals do you see and hear? What do you observe them doing?
This week we will continue working on our deep dive into our little spot of feelings by talking about how some feelings need other feelings. We will be talking about how our anger spot needs our peaceful spot to help it calm down. We are doing a fabulous job understanding how our spots impact how we are feeling, so we will be digging deeper and finding out how we should help our spots when they get too big.
When you get a chance, please fill out this permission slip for our field trip on November 22nd and if you’d like to donate items or your time to our Gratitude Grub (November 21st), please check out our sign-up genius.
Upcoming November Events:
Do you know what is inside our heads? Do you know why we breathe and what moves when we breathe? There are lots of important things inside our bodies doing important jobs! This is what we will be diving into for science this week. Students will be making organ models from dried fruit, skeleton models from paper, and exploring how joints work with straws and a glove!
This week we will discuss the big question “can objects move by themselves?” To support their exploration, students will create cars out of papers, move each other in laundry baskets, and do a number of actions to explore the foundation of physics.
This week we will be learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin. Your students will learn how pumpkins start from a seed and grow into a pumpkin. On Friday, we will get the opportunity to dissect pumpkin as a class. We will review what living things need to live and grow. Plants need air, light, space, soil, and water to live and grow.
Pumpkin Life Cycle
Seed → Sprout → Vine → Flower → Green Pumpkin → Pumpkin
This week we will get to learn about another pollinator, bats! Remind your students that pollinators are useful because we need them to help plants grow. There are many types of pollinators, and they all do their part to help plants flourish.
This week we will take a closer look at what living things need to survive. Through hands-on activities, students will explore how animals and plants get their needs: water, food, air, and shelter. We are so excited to have some fun with our learning!
This week, we will be taking a break and beginning another unit in Science. In preparation for our field trip to Miller Farms we hope to have on September 25th, we will be doing a unit all about the difference between living things and non-living things. During this unit, your student will learn all about what is living vs. non-living. At home you can ask your student if something is living and non-living and see if they can do it!
It is our first week of social studies! Our kinders will learn all about community helpers! Who they are and why they are so important to our community. If you are a community helper, we would love for you to join our class sometime this week or next week. Please email me if you are interested. You must have a background check in order to join our class, which you can find here.
This week in Science, we will be talking all about severe weather. We will be building on their knowledge of the weather and the seasons, and taking it one step further with the idea of severe weather and shelter. They will be learning about Tornadoes, Blizzards, and earthquakes, as well as talking about why shelter is so important! They will be conducting experiments throughout the week, including things like tornadoes in a bottle, as well as creating their own shelter out of materials in the classroom!