Kinder Class

Hello Everyone. This entry is supposed to cover everything from December through yesterday. I have chosen not to detail the goings on from before the winter play because it feels like ancient history. Much of our time back then was in fact dominated by play rehearsals, as well as another bout of illness that went around the classroom. It has been so good to have full attendance lately. Please note, I have put some text here in bold to indicate work you can do with your children at home if you want to extend the learning and are not sure how.

Math:

We started January with time to play some mathematical board games: Mancala, Dominoes, Spot It, and a homemade game (see picture of Zoe below). The kids got practice with number recognition, adding, estimating, strategizing, memory, and the non-mathematical but oh-so -important-principle of how to be a good sport, a gracious winner and not a bitter loser. Some teachers don’t introduce competitive games at this early age but I do, in part because I am super competitive, but also because I was such a sore loser as a child. Like I told the kids, I was obsessed with monopoly and would go to my room in tears if I lost against my parents. I think it’s important to know how to win and lose, to understand the concept of luck in a game, and also to feel the thrill of legitimately winning a game that involves strategy, even if that day takes a while to come with a complex game like chess or mandala. Anyway, we’ll be doing more of this as the weeks go by. So far so good. At home: Play math games. There are so many (Sorry, Backgammon, Connect 4, War, Go Fish etc.) and they are such a great way to teach everyday math concepts, painlessly.

Other concepts we’ve been working on: We have reached number 8 in the Golden Numbers. For 7, we drew rainbows with the 7 rainbow colors in the correct order, and then wrote “rainbow” which has 7 letters, also in the rainbow colors. For 8, the kids drew octopi and spiders. No more “snowmen” 8s, with one circle atop another. They must make a continuous line for 8, starting with an S. We also talked about 8 sideways being the symbol for infinity. Only number 9 left before we move into two digit numbers.

On Bring Your Toy to School Day, the children practiced public speaking skills by presenting their toys to the group and fielding questions. Then we categorized the items and made corresponding graphs. This also involved more practice with tally marks. At home: Have your children count up how many windows, doors, chairs, beds etc. are in your home and create a chart using tally marks.

We’ve also been working on concepts of symmetry and horizontal/vertical planes of space. Below are some pictures of the children taking turns leading an exercise with pattern blocks and symmetry. I will be extending this activity over the next weeks, building upon this foundation.

Language Arts: We have moved away from individual letters introduced one at a time. For one thing, this is a bit boring and for another, the retention isn’t necessarily there if you work on one letter a week, or a day, as many teachers are fond of doing, myself included, sometimes. I find it more effective to balance this with exposure to multiple letters at a time used in a real world, applied scenario. To this end, the children have been working extensively with their “treasure boxes”. These are filled with a collection of items and their job is to identify beginning sounds for each treasure and then match the object to the letter. Once they are experts with this, they are trading boxes with a friend and trying their hand at that. They are also writing down the letters in their boxes. And eventually, they will be matching upper to lower case letters. There is so much we can do with these. See the photo gallery below. You need to scroll through to see them all. At home, make signs for objects around the house where the child identifies and writes down the first letter or the object and you write the rest. When they get good at this, you can also discuss and practice with ending sounds.

Another big language arts project involving writing has been the pen pal letters. The children received their first letter back from their pals and they were beaming as you can see in this next photo gallery. We will be working to write letters back over the next few weeks. They dictate the body of these to me but write the Dear and From portions themselves. I could really use some classroom helpers on these days. Let me know if you are interested and can spare an hour on a Tuesday or Thursday morning.

Kathleen told a special story called Straw Hats for the Gizos, an old Japanese tale, with a sweet message about kindness. I told them The Bremen Town Musicians, a not so sweet, but very exciting Grimm story wherein a band of robbers is forced out of their home by a band of animal musicians. We tell these stories multiple times, and even echo their storylines in our songs and other curriculum so the kids can really embody the stories and have them as their own tales to retell to others.

Science: We’ve had a busy month in science. Kathleen made snowflake crystals with the children, where they grew crystals on pipe cleaners. They also did “frosty paintings” using blue watercolor and salt. These are on display. We had a visit from Earthcapades, a performing duo sponsored by the Soquel Creek Water District, who taught the children about the water cycle. We extended this learning in the classroom and mother nature has been fully cooperative on the playground, bringing all this rain, for the children to experiment with, digging and damming and marveling at all the water. In class, the children made beautiful water cycle posters — see the photo. It’s amazing how many creative interpretations among the kids with only a few materials and the same set of directions.

I made it “rain” in the classroom so the kids could see the process of evaporation, condensation and precipitation up close — the hot plate represented the sun heating the earth’s water. They could see the steam rising (evaporation) and then the plate with ice was the cold air forming into clouds. After some patient waiting, they saw the water droplets condensing on the bottom of the plate and then ta-da, precipitation dripped down back into the water body (saucepan). Each of the kids took a photo of this — not sure who’s made the cut here for the blog but it’s a good one.

Our work with rocks has spanned several weeks. The children brought in special rocks and again, practiced sharing (not using their baby voices!), asking questions, the difference between a question and a comment. Then they paired up to try to find their rocks in the rock books using magnifying glasses for an up close book. They made rock reports to detail the size, shape, color of their specimens, they made posters showing the Earth and how it is made up of rock at its core. And finally we set up a museum, complete with signs the kids wrote, and they have been bringing older children in at lunch time for a supervised tour of the rock display. If you haven’t seen this yourself, come check it out. In the meantime, here are some photos.

And if you’re still with me, let me tell you about handwork. The children have been weaving up a storm with Kathleen. They’ve also begun to sew their kindergarten pillows, this is quite difficult for many of them as it requires a lot of focus, fine motor control and mental organization to remember where to place the needle so it doesn’t become a big tangle. If anyone has spare time and would like to come and work one on one with children to finish up the pillows, please, be our guest!

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you are enjoying the blog, if there are things you’d like to know more about (or less about!). See you soon!