We have been cooking up a storm with apples and pumpkins. We think the apple store will be on Monday and Tuesday. The sixth grade class cooks apple treats and sells them for 50 cents or $1 to raise money. Please send some money in with your child on both days for this exciting treat! So far our class is the most enthused about applesauce bundt cake (with a few chocolate chips - we think that is the prizewinning ingredient). All our recipes are gluten free. Sometimes they come out really good and sometimes it's back to the drawing board.

We have been prepping a program called Words Their Way. It is almost set up and we began using it with the children this week. So far they seem to like it. There's a lot of cutting and gluing. Some groups are putting pictures into categories like clothes and food, while other groups are sorting by beginning sounds. Look in your child's folder for some of this work.

We have been doing a yoga class on Tuesday afternoons with Grace, the preschool teacher. She is teaching yoga to staff and to many classes at Shutesbury. Hooray for Grace!

We continue to learn sounds in Jolly Phonics. They will bring home their first two books next week. On each page there is a little box that shows the gesture for each sound. If you try it with your child I'm sure they'll be happy to show you how they make the gestures. We have begun reading groups and are looking at very repetitous stories for the beginning readers. We have more challenging books for the children who are already reading.

We are playing some games in math around counting. Today we began measuring objects using a stick that each child had made with cubes. Many children wanted to alter their stick to find out how many cubes long each item was. That will come later, for now we are looking at what is shorter and what is longer than ten cubes. One of the more interesting discussions in math right now is asking children if it matters whether the answer is the same or different when you repeatedly count the same group of objects. So far one child insists that it's OK if the answer is 10 the first time, 8 the second time and 7 the third time. Another child insists that the answer should be the same each time. Many children are inbetween, thinking sometimes it needs to come out with the "right" answer and other times it doesn't really matter. We will continue this discussion for a long time.

Lisa and I are planning to get out the camera more often next week. We need pictures for our blog. I'll try to include some soon.Thanks for your patience!

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.