Happy New Year! (And a Gingerbread Recap)

Welcome back and Happy New Year, Team 111 Families and Friends!  I hope you all had a restful and fun holiday break.  Many thanks again for all your help and contributions for a successful  Surprise Gingerbread Celebration (if you have fun pictures or videos you'd like me to post, feel free to send them along).  It was so exciting to see the wonder on kinder's faces as we adventured through the school and the ultimate surprise to celebrate with all of you back in the classroom.  We couldn't have done it without you!  I've finally uploaded pictures of the last few gingerbread activities we did that last week before vacation.  

Gingerbread Bridges - Mrs. Kurtz joined us to help us engineer bridges for the Gingerbread Man to cross the river without getting eaten by the fox!  We looked at some of the shapes used to build different real bridges and then got to work.  After building with a partner, we put our bridges to the test!  One bridge even held close to 20 gingerbread men!

Gingerbread Baby Graphing - After reading Jan Brett's book, Gingerbread Baby, our team decorated a house for the gingerbread baby and graphed how many of each candy was used to decorate their houses.  This made for some sweet math learning as we practiced patterns, counting, and graphing.   Many thanks to Blake's Yaya for joining us!

Gingerbread Cookie Science - Kinder scientists set off to experiment what would happen when we put a gingerbread cookie in a bowl of water.  We first hypothesized what the possible outcomes might be (see detailed - ha! - drawings done by me below).  We then tested this out by putting a cookie in water and making observations.  We also recorded our findings.  At first, the cookies floated to the top, but eventually they became soggy with water and either sunk or broke apart.  We enjoyed a non-soggy cookie of our own at the end, of course.  

Gingerbread Celebration -  This one's pretty self explanatory!  What a blast our celebration was - we hope you enjoy the photos of our fun!

Reminders 

• No School - January 15th - Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• February Vacation - February 26-March 2 - No School