Sunflowers

We have been out to the garden to draw a full size picture of the sunflowers. They are gorgeous! A big thanks to Julie, April and other parents who designed, planted and tended the garden through the summer. Well done. The pictures will be on display during the Open House on Wednesday.

We spend time learning how to use easel paints, watercolors, glue pots, colored pencils, scissors, glue sticks and most exciting of all---The Pencil Sharpener! Most recently we have begun using stories on CDs with headphones.

Language Arts

We are practicing our routines around Handwriting without Tears and Jolly Phonics. We are beginning to do some reading groups, again focused on learning routines more than on learning reading. We are doing basic measures of skill levels in the area of reading both to determine eligibility for Title I services and to begin to form reading groups.

We have Morning Meeting each day which is based on developing oral language skills. Children learn to share something that is important to them, listen to the message being read by one of the children,  repeat that message, greet each other by name and sing a song or play a game. Occasionally we do an activity such as Brain Gym.

Math

We are learning routines that will serve us all year in math. Many days start with counting how many children are in school. We continue to see this as a unique problem each day, as we write down how many children are in our class, how many are in school today and how many are absent. We also form a counting stick and pass around cubes to represent how many children are in class each day.

We have done surveys such as "are you a boy or a girl?" and "are you the oldest child in your family?" We discuss the data with the group and ask the children what conclusions they can draw from the data. We have a Counting Jar with a collection of objects in it. Children are asked to count the objects and make an equivalent collection of buttons on a plate. After they have practiced this, they begin to record their count in a Counting Jar Book.

We are exploring materials that we will use all year in math. Having familiarized ourselves with these materials we will already be interested in working with them as they roll out in the context of particular units. The most impressive part of our math class this year is the willingness of children to engage in discussions about math ideas with each other. They are listening to each other and we hope to build a culture where children can talk about each other's ideas. This is a stretch as five-year olds are expected to be egocentric rather than able to listen to others' points of view, think about what they have heard and decide to adjust their point of view or reaffirm their own statement.

We will have more pictures next month.

We're Off and Running

We've gotten off to a terrific start in kindergarten this year. Many of the children know each other from pre-school and everyone is getting along quite well. The beginning of the school year focuses on learning procedures and how to navigate the kindergarten classroom. We have been quite busy!

There is a photo of the opening day assembly at which all children received a journal from a sixth grade student. Thank you very much for returning forms to Toni so we now have permission to print pictures of the children in our blog. We will begin taking more photos of the children to include in the blog.

Eric Carle Activities

We have been making lots of connections to Eric Carle books in our study of his work. Children brought home their Today Is Monday books a few weeks ago. We read My Apron and had each child design and color an apron to bring home. We read Walter the Baker, then made pretzels. We set up lots of seed experiments to test out different growing conditions after reading The Tiny Seed. One child is writing about the results of some of our seed experiments. Our final project was to write our own Eric Carle type story, called The Lazy Little Caterpillar, in which the caterpillar finds a good reason to not be so lazy anymore. We will put the book in our classroom library. perhaps you can check it out next year. Some of the illustrations are gorgeous!

Presenting Our Bodies

After researching different systems in our bodies the children created a presentation that was recorded into a computer program. We showed the program at assembly and the kids did a fine job. There are also some pictures of children jumping on a trampoline and listening to the effect this has on their heart rate.

Chick Hatch

We had a less than successful chick hatch this year. Out of three dozen eggs there were only six chicks that survived. Nonetheless those six chicks were very appreciated. We also "dissected" an egg from the grocery store to look at the parts of an egg. Some of the highlights were the air sac, the chaleze, the germinal disc and of course the yolk and the two parts of the white. we also looked at one of the eggs that did not hatch and found that it had stopped developing around day 12 of the 21 day incubation period. We also had a visit from some ducklings that April brought in for the children to see.