September/October in the Kindergarten Classroom
Hello Parents,
Welcome to my blog. Here you will find lots of photos of daily life in our classroom, videos too occasionally, and some detailed information about curriculum and the many activities your children are engaged with throughout their first Orchard year. I love to know when you have read this and if you have any comments to share. This lets me know this blog is interesting to you and helps me feel like taking the time to write it!
We are settling into a regular rhythm now and the days are zipping by full of opportunities to grow and flourish. It was great meeting with you at the Back to School event — I spoke about some of these activities and now you can see photos and read a bit more about them.
Working with Hands:
Developing fine motor control is essential if a child is to feel comfortable and proficient with handwriting. Handwork, like sewing, weaving, finger-knitting, gives practice moving left to right, up to down, and to be organized with materials. The kids have been honing scissor skills, learning effective gluing methods, working on the correct pencil grip, and learning to write their names with an initial capital letter and the rest of the letters in lowercase. I also like to emphasize that writing is a two-handed activity: one hand to hold the pencil and the other hand to hold the paper and be anchored.
Here the kids take a first stab at finger knitting. This was the first week of school. They now have the hang of it and can make long yarn necklaces using this initial knitting technique. As soon as they express interest, they can move to two-pronged fork-knitting, 4 and 6 pronged tower knitting, and one day knitting with sticks. These are meditative skills that keep the hands and minds busy and are so satisfying in that you make something beautiful every time.
Working on the apple family collages. Apples are always a theme at this time of year. They’ve heard stories about apples like Kathleen’s beautiful Apple Tree Elves puppet show and a traditional story I tell about a boy who is looking for a “little red house with no windows and no doors and a star inside.” Did they bring this riddle home to you? Did you solve it?
They’ve wet felted apples — see photos further down. They harvested apple seeds, made apple sauce and apple crisp, taste tested apples and graphed the results, and learned the sound “a” for apple.
Math
We begin the year with a couple of overarching concepts — patterns and symmetry. We’ve delved into both at great length, coming at them from many angles. With patterns, we’ve used sound, color, shapes, food, and experimented with simple ABABAB patterns to ABCABC to AABAAB etc. We also translated one type of pattern (like a color block pattern into a sound pattern with sounds and clicks). Check out the sweet little videos below. Avalyn and Liam were particularly into this and came up with pretty complex patterns.
Making fruit kebabs in a pattern. The kids had to practice patience as I would not let them eat their fruit until they told me the pattern.
Here the children worked in partners practicing leading and following as they built symmetrical patterns with pattern blocks. Then they worked individually to create their own design using between 12 and 20 blocks and then duplicating this on paper with paper shapes. They worked methodically and skillfully on this.
Language Arts
As well as diving deep into stories, the children have been learning phonics using the PAF method. So far, I’ve introduced the hard sound for “c”, the short vowel sound for “a” and the sound “t” and the word “cat”. We will continue to build this body of phonics and words. They been practicing their names as mentioned earlier and pictured below.
Science
We did a unit on germs and proper hand washing techniques. I covered their hands with lotion (snot) and glitter (germs) and then they watched the transfer of “germs” from one hand to another and on to another and also the value of covering sneezes with elbows as opposed to hands. Then they washed in cold water quickly and then again in warm water with soap counting to 20.
Another science activity was revamping the worm bin — separating the worms from the worm casting (using these to amend the garden beds) and then giving the worms new bedding and food. Some touched worms for the first time and some didn’t want to. Everyone helped in one way or another.
Last week, the children tested whether different items sink or float, after first making educated guesses and then speculating on the results. The floating pumpkin was the big surprise at the end.
Harvest
The children gathered kale from the garden to make the kale salad for the festival
They harvested lavender and lemon verbena from my garden, taking the leaves from the stalks. We’ll use these for future projects. And strawberry corn donated by Avie’s family.
They picked flowers for the flower press, gathered leaves for leaf rubbings, and collected acorns for upcoming acorn projects.
Busy, busy children.
Please continue to share bounty from your gardens. The children are always so proud and happy to share what they grow or buy. We always love to have the variety for our rest time where the sandman or sand-woman brings a little offering to help the mind and body rest. I’m sure you’ve heard about kinder rest time.
A lady came to visit from the SPCA to teach the children about safety around dogs, how to approach a dog and read dog body language. They fell in love with Po, a very sweet and friendly doggy. The first grade joined us and we I received an email from Alison, the presenter, about how well-behaved the Orchard kids were and what good questions they asked.
Working on “cutting lessons”, name writing, and drawing pictures inspired by stories Kathleen has told. Kathleen will add photos soon that show the beautiful story worlds the kids have been creating using her handmade felted dolls. They are practicing inventing their own stories and telling them to an audience (each other)
Wet felting apples and watching the Apple Tree Elves puppet show
I will try hard to write this once a month so it doesn’t feel quite as overwhelming to write (and read!). There is a lot that is not reflected here in this photos and text. Often, I don’t have time to take pictures but this should certainly give you a nice little window into Orchard kindergarten.
~ Rosy