Welcome Kindergarten Families and Friends

And They’re Off

The kindergartners are off to a great start this year. We go very slowly at this time of year to make sure everyone understands the routines and the expectations in kindergarten. We teach how to get in a line, how to stand in a line, how to walk down the hallway and how to enter a room. We line up in a different way outside than we do inside and we still gather at the flagpole every morning and find a partner before we go to the room. 

We are learning greetings, how to read the morning message and how to share. We talk about how other people feel if you won’t hold their hand or say good morning to them. We’ll talk about this a lot and may use some Social Thinking curriculum this year to help children understand another person’s perspective.

We have been exploring materials in math and talking about all the different ways we can count the children in our class. We have learned the sounds for the letters /s/, /a/, /t/, /i/ and /p/. It’s amazing how many words you can make with those letters. Tomorrow is /n/.

We have just begun building letters with sticks. Next we will make them with chalkboards and then we will learn how to write them. Ask your child to show you a pencil pickup.

We will put a link in soon for the recipe for the GF Oat Muffins we made on Friday. They were a big hit! The blog will become much more interesting when we learn whom we have permission to include photographs for. 

Working Hard on Our Bodies

We have been very busy this spring learning about all the different systems in our bodies. Each child has learned about what is inside them, written a page about each system we studied and created the systems inside a bag which represents their body. Whew!

Each child has made a model of their internal organs inside a paper bag. Their buddies helped them with this as seen in the photos.

Children compiled a book of their writings about their nervous system and brain, digestive system, respiratory system, reproductive system, elimination system, muscular system, skeletal system and circulatory system. They also choose one system on which to do more research. Their buddies from 5/6th grade helped them use books for research and then do some computer research. We then put this into the kindergartner's own words. We will present this at assembly on Friday, June 13th. We hope to see you there.

Pictures are not loading currently, so I will try to add them at another time.

Reading

The kids are making solid progress in their reading skills. We have aligned the reading materials in kindergarten, first grade and second grade and are finding that the children are doing quite well. here is a shot of some children in a reading group. We have word wall activities as well where the children practice cheering the letters in a word, writing the word and reading the word to each other.

Language Arts

We have spent a lot of time on rhyming activities, matching beginning sounds and matching ending sounds. We do this with pictures, with the emphasis on children hearing the sounds in words. Children stamp pictures with matching sounds, play bingo games with matching sounds and use magnetic boards to categorize pictures. The photo shows ending sounds in words.

We also acted out the story Papagayo, a tale of how a dog eats the moon, causing it to shrink made paper plates masks for the different animals in the story.

every month. We

The Fix-It Shop

Children have had a great time taking apart typewriters (what are those?), answering machines, telephones and CD players. Thank you to Emma's family for their donations to our shop. One child was very excited to discover a magnet inside the CD player, which led to a discussion of magnets being a part of what makes machines move.

Geometry Unit

We have just begun a unit on geometry. The children wrote a classroom book called The Shape of Things, based on a story by Dayle Ann Dodds in which each child made a page based on a specific shape they chose. We have been working with making shapes on geoboards with rubber bands. We have also made shapes with playdough and mat boards. Children have played a game called Fill the Hexagon. They roll a shape die and fill the game board with their shapes. Most recently we took a walk around the school looking for three dimensional shapes. We found cones, rectangular prisms, cylinders and spheres. The only thing we had trouble finding was pyramids. The last image shows a computer program we have used for creating shapes. The kids love doing shapes on the computer.