Spring Has Sprung!

Last week was our Spring Break, so to welcome kids back and practice the Super 3 a little, I decided to do a lesson on spring with my Kinders. We started by talking about spring and what they did over break, but then talked about the 3 steps of the Super 3. (I took some slide shots of my SMART notebook using Jing which I love and is a free download by the way.)

 After talking about the 3 steps and why it is thus called the Super 3, we talked about the questions you might ask yourself for the steps. I went to a slide with the question What do we want to know about Spring? and let the kids tell me some things they wanted to know. We got some good questions, I really liked the question about why snakes come out because it showed some of their prior knowledge about hibernation ending, cold blooded animals, etc. These are worded the way they asked them. I just wrote them on the SMART board.

 Next, for the DO step of the Super 3, we talked about ways we could learn more about Spring to try to answer some of our questions. Here are the answers I got from the kids. I asked about what kinds of people could you find out information from and that is where the answer of the Easter Bunny came in! I especially liked that one, but I also thought it seemed like a good answer - he would probably know about Spring! We did talk about the fact that it might be hard to get to talk to him since you don't usually get to see him though. We started to go off course a little here though because once the Easter Bunny came up, several kids wanted to add Santa Claus, but we talked about how Santa comes in the Winter during Christmas so he would know more about that season instead of Spring. I also thought the idea about checking the weather was clever, it again shows some prior knowledge of that understanding that weather changes with the seasons.

 After brainstorming, we read this book about Spring and talked about using books to gather information. Then we also looked at a couple of short clips about Spring from the site WatchKnowLearn. This one is a time lapse of a forest area over all four seasons, this one is a silly song about Spring sung by animals (but they love it and it does have some discussion points like baby animals and waking from hibernation), and this one that is a song to guess each of the four seasons.

 After we looked at and discussed the information from our sources, we talked about how we could show what we learned and here is what they came up with.

 Then, we went back to the original questions and talked about how we could apply things we learned to answer the questions we had to start with and what we still needed to find out more about. I had planned to also do a quick SMARTboard sort with signs of Spring or not, but we ran out of time for it!

This was a lesson that kept the kids engaged and interested which is hard with Kinders. I will definately do more of lessons like this to keep exposing them to the Super 3 so that when they get to third grade it is not a leap to get to the Big 6.

Any lessons you love with Super 3 or for Kinders?