The Past Two Months

April 2017

In math we have begun a unit on data. We have made graphs using objects, the pattern blocks, and learning to put them in order from the group with the smallest amount to the group with the largest amount. We have practiced categorizing children on the basis of what they are wearing and we started to categorize our favorite foods today.

We are continuing reading and writing. We have worked in our books that we are making about our bodies. And we have learned about more reading “superpowers”. We use more of the sounds in the words we read to make sense out of what we see in the text and the picture. We are putting our paper bag bodies together and have added about half the systems.

We went to the Quabbin yesterday and stocked rainbow trout. We released 800 trout into the water and then visited the Hatchery to see the eggs, fry, swim-ups and minnows, all different phases of the trout’s life cycle. We fed the trout in tanks and then came home, quite tired from a long day in the sun. A big thanks to Clif Read for organizing this trip each year!!

May 2017

Kindergarten is finishing up their project about the human body, having constructed their bodies and written their book. They are beginning work on their presentations for assembly with the awesome help of Ms. Lobenstine and Ms. Lee.

We are carefully tending our eggs, hoping for a hatch next week.

Everyone is making great progress in their reading. This week we made up play dates with our books. Children thought of a game to play that involved reading their book to a group of children. Things like cover the word and have their group guess what the word was, predict what would happen next in the the story or p[lay teacher and read the book to their group.

We have been working on collecting data and making sense of it in math. Yesterday we correlated all the data on weather we have been collecting for the entire year. We still are working on it. There's lots of data.

We had a fire engine visit as part of the SAFE program in Amherst. Children practiced STOP! DROP! and ROLL! They watched Ms. Ingram dress up in a fire fighter's suit and went on the fire engine. They were totally thrilled!

Mo Willems

Kindergarten has finished up a Mo Willems unit. We read books from three different series; Knuffle Bunny, Pigeon and Duckling and Elephant and Piggie. Children wrote opinion pieces on the books they had read and put these together in a Mo Willems book of their own. We'll show them to you at parent conferences.
We have begun a unit in math that is working with numbers in the teens. We have been doing inventory bags and combining two cards to calculate the total. Currently we are doing number orders where children travel to stations placing orders for toys and checking that their order was filled correctly. They love it! We are talking about story problems. We are still interested in whether we are combining groups or taking groups away. We have also started using cubes to represent things in the problem like pencils or blocks.

Our friends from Ms Willis' class join us for cooking on Thursdays.

We are just beginning our body unit and have put our brains in today. We will talk about what our brain does tomorrow.

Fun in the Snow and Ice

Kindergartners have been tracking weather (we added temperature to our weather data) and have been looking at states of matter; liquid and frozen. This has come together happily in ice sculptures. We put containers of colored water in the court yard. When they froze we invited our buddies to help us use them as building blocks in making ice sculptures. That afternoon they started melting and the next day they were covered with snow in our first big storm. They remain covered, but eventually will emerge from the snow and be visible again. Lots of opportunities to see them frozen and melted!

We began a Mo Willems unit and have been reading Knuffle Bunny books. Children are writing opinion pieces on their favorite KB book and stating reasons why they like it. We would appreciate any Mo Willems books you would like to loan us for this study, as we can always use more. If you send some in make sure your child's name in is them.

We made delicious (and healthy) heart shaped chocolates for Valentine's Day. It's the recipe we sent home earlier, using raw cacao powder, coco butter and raw palm sugar. We distributed Valentine's and had a party on Tuesday.

In math we are studying 3-dimensional shapes. We've gone on shape hunts, learned to describe them talking about sides and vertices, made copies of 3-D cube structures (much harder than it sounds) and made a copy of a block by building it with smaller blocks. We have also experimented with creating "group worthy" tasks during our math time. These are activities that require a group of children to work together to figure out the answer. One example was the copying cubes activity. One child held the sculpture and gave the other two children directions on how to build it. They shared feedback with each other during the process, like how many cubes to use, where to place them, whether it looked similar to the model etc. They did quite well.

Stuffies and Jammies

The children have been working on filling a jar with cubes for god behavior. When the jar is full they choose a reward for their behavior. This year the front runners were being kitties and stuffies and jammies. These choices beat out things like a movie and popcorn and a party with our buddies. As you know the final choice was stufies and jammies. See the very cute pictures attached.

We introduced the idea of equations as part of making a math book. Children made pages of tiles for the numbers 5-10 and we have just begun to ask them how they see groups of tiles. In the number six, some might see 1+3+2 = 6, others might see 3+3 = 6 and someone else might see 4+2 = 6. We will wrap this up soon and come back to it later. We continue to tell story problems and ask children to repeat the story we told, visualize it and act it out. W are more interested in laying the groundwork now than in solving the problem. We begin a unit on 3D geometry next week.

We are focused on sight words in language arts. We call them snap words and hope to learn to say them in a snap. We have been playing lotto games, car races and practice cheering the words as well as writing them.We are developing our picture power in ou reading, our snap word power and our sound power (does the word we are reading sound the same at the beginning as the word we see on the page).

We plan to begin a Mo Willems unit soon.

We have stopped doing yoga for now, as Grace can no longer meet with us during the time we had set aside. We'll let you know if we can find a new slot.

There is no school on Monday, March 13th for the kindergarten class only. This is the visit day for next year's class, so we ask the kindergartners to stay home. The following day, March 14th is a field trip to the Fine Arts Center to see Frog and Toad. This will be for K, 1 and 2. We haven't told the kids yet.

Children continue to enjoy doing DreamBox and like to play hide-and-seek. They seem to have dropped the idea of a robot play.

Adding and Subtracting

We are jumping into more complex work in kindergarten math. We played One More One less, where children figured out what the answer would be when they added or subtracted one. Then we played Build It, Change It; one person drew a card and put pennies on the board to match the number and the other person drew a card and changed the pennies to match the second card. Both activities were confusing initially, but the children figured them out with practice. We have been practicing writing numbers and visualizing dots on a ten-frame so we can make a copy.

We are working on our Super Powers in reading. We have learned about pointing power, the power to match the word we are saying to the word on the page. We are paying attention to the first letter and sound in a word to help us match what we are saying to the word we are pointing to. We practiced songs and poems that we are familiar with to learn to match our pointer to what we were saying. We've talked about reread power, where we go back and read again, if our pointing does not match the number of words in a sentence. Next week we will talk about partner power, where our reading partners help us match the print to what we are saying. It's work being a Super Hero!!

We made our own chocolate using cacao powder. We dipped fruit in it and thought it was so delicious that we sent the recipe home with children. That was an alternative to taking home pieces of chocolate dipped fruit to share with our parents.

Some children want to make a play about robots. They are working on costumes, but haven't started work on a script. If they told you to come to assembly to see the play, don't believe them yet. They have a long way to go.

We read a story and talked about Martin Luther King Jr. and how his white friend told him that his parents wouldn't let him play with Martin anymore because he was colored not white. That provoked some thoughtful discussion on skin color and discrimination. The children have good ideas about kindeness that go beyond outrage over the unfairness.

Happy New Year

We had a very busy week leading up to the break, getting gifts ready to send home, making perler bead frames and cards for our buddies and making gift wrap. We hope you enjoyed your ball.

We have introduced kindergarten to DreamBox, an on-line math program. Everyone will have set up their account by the end of the day and a letter will come home on Friday telling you how you can access it at home, if you choose. We realize not everyone has a fast internet connection at home. I will send you their password (a picture) when the letter comes home and will check with Polly to see that the home part of the program is set up later in the week.

In reading we will begin a unit called Super Powers, calling children to use their Super Power of reading to read charts, labels. signs and books!

We are counting, adding and playing games such as Collect 15, One More or One Less and acting out story problems in math.

We have been collecting data on weather for several months and will add information on temperature to this in the new year. We will look at freezing and thawing; liquid and solid states of water as we track the temperature.

The Fix-It Shop

We have been working hard in the fix-it shop, figuring out ways to take apart old appliances. One child is expert with a screwdriver and understands "Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty". Many children use the claw on a hammer to take things apart and some just bang away with the hammer. Your child may have brought home some prize parts to use at home in projects.

Leaf Pictures with Buddies

We have been learning different ways of reading a book to ourselves and to our partners. We learn to look at the pages again and see what we missed the first time. We pay attention to the parts of the book that make us more curious or more excited. We look for words that might be connected to what the book is about. We relate what's in the book to things we already know about. We look at the pictures and connect them to words. What does this look like? When we are reading a book about beetles, we notice that one beetle is spraying something. What's that? It's poisonous gas to protect itself! Two beetles are fighting. What are those great big "antlers"? Oh, they use them to fight. If the book is about beetles can we find a word that looks like beetle on each page? We recently spent our time looking for the word "the" in our books and noting it when we saw it. We looked for the word "is" too.  Using these kinds of clues one child discovered that he could read half of his book about soccer to the class. It's exciting. We are working in our reading groups too and are matching rhyming words and beginning sounds as well.

We have been measuring lots of things in math. Most recently we measured our names by making a cube letter for each letter in our name and comparing our towers to the names of other kids in the class. Currently we are taking four handfuls of cubes and comparing the towers we build, as we put them in order from the smallest to the largest. We are also emphasizing vocabulary such as more, most, less, least, fewer, fewest, and greater, greatest, as we talk about our towers.

Tomorrow we will make leaf collage pictures with our buddies and plan to have them ready to share at assembly on Friday, November 18th. I will let you know closer to the time.

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.