Stocking Trout

Additional Activities

Some of the other things we have been doing recently include having a pajama day in kindergarten. Here are some shots of children reading to their stuffed animals. A great idea at home too! Don't forget reading to cats, dogs or fish either. We love reading in any form. We put away our Fix-It shop and opened a woodworking area. So far we have been learning to use a saw, and will begin using a hammer next week. As you can see the structures that children are building in blocks are getting much more elaborate. Michele is starting a handwriting group in our classroom on Thursdays to give children some extra practice.

We have some pictures of read, write or draw, an activity that replaces our second recess in the winter weather. We are ecstatic to be going outdoors twice a day again!

Morning Meeting

Each morning we have a meeting and greet each child by name. Here are a few shots of popular greetings. Two children are shaking ankles and greeting each other and the children are making a spider web as they they roll a ball of yarn to the child they are greeting.

Exciting Specials

We're including some photos from physical education. We had a unit on gymnastics a month ago. In music we were playing drums and xylophones earlier this week. Today in art we were making clay fish, as a follow up to our field trip to the Quabbin.

Geometry

We are studying shapes, including properties of 2-D and 3-D shapes. Children have been making circles and spheres, squares and square prisms, rectangles and rectangular prisms, etc. We took a shape walk around the building and made a shape poster of all the cones, pyramids, cylinders, and prisms we found around the building. We have built these shapes with playdough, comparing wooden or colored blocks to what we are building.

We have made two dimensional shapes on geoboards using rubber bands. We made a shape book in the format of "a square is a square until you add a roof and a chimney, and then it's a house." We followed this up with a mural we made of a ski slope, using shapes to fill in the skiers and the parts of the ski mountain. We have also filled in puzzles trying out assortments of pattern blocks that can all be used to fill the same shape. Another example of this is Fill the Hexagon in which children find as many different ways as possible to make a hexagon.

An offshoot of this study of shapes is a renewed interest in building elaborate block structures. The most challenging activity we have done is to build structures out of snap cubes. Children are asked to duplicate three-dimensional structures, learning to count cubes, telling themselves whether to put more cubes on this side or that side as they figure out how to describe the structure to themselves. .

Our Bodies

We began work on our brains and nervous system a month ago. We have since added our digestive system, including intestines, and our lungs. The pictures show children making their spines and measuring out the length of their intestines, 30 feet on average. We do a lot of writing about our bodies in language arts, after reading about the system and then making a poster about the concepts we have learned. When children write in their own book, they refer to the poster, as well as consulting books about what they are studying.

The Fix-It Shop

We have been having a great time in our fix-it shop. We started by taking apart a typewriter, finding many parts that we never expected. The hardest part is those stubborn screws that are buried deeply inside the appliances. It takes muscle power! We have moved onto taking apart a vacuum, a pencil sharpener and a fan.