cause and effect

The kinders are going crazy. They can taste the looming Thanksgiving vacation. One more day. We can do this.

Today I salvaged our day today by introducing Rube Goldberg machines. We're studying cause and effect this week, so it fit with the curriculum and it enchanted my kinders. They were in heaven. Anyone walking past my classroom at several points during the day would have heard my students oohing and aahing. To make things better, at the end of the day, they could tell me what cause and effect means!

We were without specials this afternoon, so I moved our math interventions to specials time, and then we experimented. My kinders used materials from the classroom to create their own "Rube Goldberg Machines." Now, being kindergarteners, these machines were really more like a mess of materials, but a lot of cause and effect was going on. 

Here's a little snippet of the end of my day. I hope yours was as exciting!

Now that you've seen what my kinders made of Rube Goldberg, if you have never seen one, or didn't realize what you were watching, here is the video that entranced my class.