Kinder Class

Hello Parents,

Well, believe it or not, the end of the school year is almost here. I find it hard to believe. It’s been a whirlwind. Every year, it seems to go by more and more quickly. This is the last blog for me with this class. I hope you have enjoyed reading in more detail about our activities and seeing all of the pictures.

This is a fantastic group of kindergarteners. They have grown so much in every way. Ruby just commented at rest time yesterday that their resting rugs were so small. They used to fit their bodies back in September! On the whole, the kids are a very energetic bunch as you no doubt have noticed. They have bonded so closely and I can definitely say that everyone enjoys time with each other, in varying friendship configurations. That is always one of our goals — for each child to make a friend of everyone in the class. It’s happened. More on the group dynamic — no one in this lot is lacking in confidence or ideas. They have LOUD voices, they are independent and not scared to be heard and to get what they need. It has been a delight. We are excited they will get to blend with the soon-to-be second graders in a first/second grade configuration. I think it will be refreshing for them to have more friendship opportunities and to have the added opportunities for differentiation that come with blended grade groupings.

One of our activities this month was writing another letter to pen pals. In this letter, the children included photos of themselves. Here is the photo shoot we did, outtakes included. I love these photos. You can just see all of the personality bubbling in this group of kids. (Unfortunately, Taytem was absent that day but I used a photo of him that I had taken earlier in the year.)

Here’s what we’ve been up to this past month:

Language Arts:

Pen pal letters

Writing full names including middle names

Handwriting — penmanship including uniformity in letter size, spacing between words, and where to start a word on a page so the whole thing fits.

Uppercase and lowercase letter identification

Phonics

Rhyming words

The photos above show some of the children working on writing their names beautifully and perfectly. The photo below is of ChetanWin’s adjacent page where the assignment was to draw a picture of your true or imagined self and then dictate a caption.

Arias particularly loved this activity and was well on his way to finding all of the possible designs.

Math:

We’ve spent a lot of time exploring shapes, both 2D and 3D.

Quilt Square Challenge:

The children organized triangles onto quilt squares, figuring out how many possible configurations there were when you have 4 squares making a larger 4 inch square with 4 black triangles and 4 white triangles, 2 of which fit together to form one of the smaller squares. See photos to get a visual. My explanation is confusing. I did the same activity with the other grades when I subbed for Kenza one day. It’s amazing how this kind of brain power (figuring out how shapes fit together and how many different combinations there are) is fairly independent of age. A few kindergarteners were really driven to find all 30 possibilities and a couple came close. Later, they replicated their favorite quilt square with two colors of their choice and I assembled all of these squares (including those from other grades) into the paper quilt you see on the wall in the classroom.

I read the kids a story about a little hedgehog whose square shaped house burns down so he explores other shape designs he could use to build his new house. He runs into a number of geometric problems until he eventually settles on a new shape that works. The story is called “Snuffles’ Dilemma.” The kids made replica hedgehog families out of modeling clay and toothpicks, and then painted cube shaped houses (made from milk cartons). I set up a shop with signs and gave them money with which to purchase the decorating materials. This involved work with one-to-one correspondence, planning purchases as the kids did not have enough money to buy everything available, and reading signs and figuring out how many items a penny would buy. Depending on the item, a penny could buy you different amounts.

Then we moved on to an exploration of other 3D shapes like spheres (I deconstructed various objects like an orange so they could see it was made of circles that go from small to bigger to smaller again). They experimented with how to build a cube out of smaller cubes, and so learned that a cube has six sides, each with the same surface area (same number of smaller cubes). They cut 2D shapes out of paper and turned these into cones, pyramids and cylinders. They were intrigued and very motivated to make Snuffle’s the best house they could. These will be coming home on Friday.

Science:

We had a busy month in science. We spent a good deal of time making natural dyes out of beets, red cabbage and onion skins, adding vinegar to the final solutions and dipping eggs and leaving them to soak overnight to to see how these materials affected the eggs. We then rubbed them with oil to give them a special shiny look. Kathleen grew wheat grass with the kids for their Easter baskets and also helped them transform another material, wool, by wet felting this into adorable little eggs to hold the lovely chicks she needle felted for each child. They also made hot cross buns. See the gallery of photos — making the dyes, felting the eggs, and, finished products. We also began an investigation into ladybugs — they made ladybug lifecycle posters, we shared ladybug facts and soon they will make ladybug jigsaw puzzles and release ladybugs into the garden after noticing how they look close up under a magnifying glass and documenting this with a scientific illustration.

I love this photo. Ruby helping Taytem with a string figure he was working on.

Other fun things: A visit to the pool at rest time and a sand delivery.

Other things on the agenda from now until June:

We’ll put on a restaurant for the first graders — making food, creating money and menus, and learning what it takes to run a restaurant, divvying up the various roles, and practicing being good hosts.

Hands on exploration of 2 digit numbers and more practice writing single digit numbers

2 Field trips (Fire Station and Hedgerow Farm — The Collins’ family farm)

Making gifts for 5/6 graduates and for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day

A “book report” on Noddy, which we are almost finished reading

And then, summer! It would be great for the kids’ future development if you continue to read to them as much as possible over the summer, create handwriting, letter identification activities, and play board games or other games that require math strategies like counting, adding/subtracting and so on. But of course, family time and relaxation is the priority.

Kinder Cafe 2019 — 2 days of preparation before we invited our guests, the first graders, who ran the cafe last year for the grade above them.