How Much Sugar?

First, my apologies for not writing for the last little while. I have been quite sick, but am up and at 'em again! I have about 15 posts written in my head and can't wait to share what is happening in our classroom.

Our most recent inquiries are Petsmart (which you may have been hearing about!), hairdressing and sugar! This post will talk about our healthy eating interests.

As you may know, our school is focusing on healthy eating this month. As part of this initiative, we have started to ask our students about what healthy foods they eat and which healthy foods they are bringing with them to school. Over and over again we hear the students say things like:

"How much sugar is in juice?"

"There is no sugar in cheese strings. They are healthy."

"Do you put sugar in water?"
Because of this interest in the big "S", we have decided to look into sugar in our foods. While sugar is not always a bad thing-- I for one can attest to the need to have a sweet now and again!--- we are talking about sugar in our foods and how much sugar we should eat every day when we are 4, 5 and 6 years old.

One of the things that has been most interesting to our students so far is that juice boxes are not healthy. Many of our kids assume that juice is good for you because it is juice, which has led to discussions about "artificial" foods and flavours-- which we are calling "fake" for the purposes of kindergarten!

This has the same amount of sugar in one pouch as...

Just under 1/2 cup of sugar.... or.....

31.6 Hershey's Kisses!

Some things that have suprised us as NOT being healthy, but having healthy foods:
-most juice boxes
-cheese sun chips
-cheesies
-doritios

Oh, how different my life would be if this was good for you to eat!

Later this week we will be doing a visual with how much sugar we eat in a day and how much sugar is in some of our foods. We will also be taste testing sugar vs salt... some of us aren't quite sure about the difference!

Stay tuned!

We're Going on a Shape Hunt!

I apologize for such a long break in blogging! I am determined to get back to it as soon as possible, and I thought I'd start with what happened after the holidays and just before my absence from the classroom-- our shape exploration!

As I'm sure most of you have heard (and sang... hopefully not over and over and OVER again!) we have been learning a variety of shape songs and poems to help us identify 2D and 3D shapes. When I left, we were exploring a variety of 2D shapes, using the 2D Shape Song and Shape Monster poem. As part of that, we decided to go on a shape hunt.

First, we found many objects that were either a circle, square, rectangle, and triangle. We sorted them and talked about what they looked like.

The ball of yarn was VERY creative!

These might not look like squares, but it's truly the camera angle!

 

Next, we decided to MAKE SHAPES WITH OURSELVES! It was a lot of fun... especially figuring out how to make our bodies into a rectangle, and not a square.



Triangle!



Circle. (Well... we tried our best).

Square-- all sides are one person long

Two long people and two squishy people!

Overall, it was a good time to look at shapes! We are now past shapes in our song, so look for lots of holiday celebrations coming soon!