More Pictures

Here a few more pictures of free play in the morning and  physical education with Mrs. Taylor as a substitute,

Leaf Pictures with Our Buddies

In an annual tradition extending back many years, the kindergartners and their buddies gather leaves in the autumn and make wonderful pictures together. On Friday, they will share these pictures in assembly. Here are some shots of the children making the pictures.

Comparisons and Patterns in Math

As you may have heard during parent conferences, we have been working with comparisons in math. We looked for things longer than and shorter than our cube towers. We took handfuls of cubes and organized them from shortest to longest. When we made towers based on the number of letters in our names we were able to compare our names to other kid's. We also took four different names, organizing them from the shortest to the longest. The final step was to draw 3-4 playing cards and organize them from smallest to biggest.

We moved on to making patterns, beginning the unit with a walk where we carefully observed our outdoor environment. We played a game of studying objects on a tray. When our partner removed one, we had to guess what was missing. Clapping, tapping and copying movement patterns has been a way of building body awareness of what a pattern is. Recently, we have been building cube towers and sorting them into groups by whether they are a pattern or not.  We are now building patterns with a variety of materials and starting to record some of the patterns we made. Our conversations are building our ideas about what a pattern is and working to uncover the important features of patterns.

Language Arts

We have been writing some classroom books in which each child creates a page that is later compiled into a book. The first one we did was called I Like Pizza, Yum! Yum! Yum! We will use this book to practice syllables in words. Our next project is A Book of Thanksgiving. Each child will write a page about something they appreciate. We have traced leaves and will make a tree of things we are grateful for. We have read some Native American stories about appreciating the earth and each other, such as Chief Jake Swamp's Thanksgiving Address. As we get closer to Thanksgiving we will read stories that focus on the feast traditionally celebrated.

We have also been working with the beginning sounds in words and rhyming words. We play lotto games, matching games, board games and songs, like Down By the Bay. We are building sentences using word cards with words the children are learning to read.

We have been cooking as well. We made cookies when the children chose a Halloween party as their reward for earning a jar full of cubes with their good behavior. Thank you to all the parents who sent in treats! We cooked pumpkin seeds after we carved a pumpkin. Thanks to the 5/6th grade classes we had some apples. We made applesauce and when we had some left over we made applesauce cake. We've been eating well!