Hello Everyone,

This blog got away from us! It’s been 2.5 months and there is so much we have covered. It’s hard to do it justice. We have dozens of photos to share but even so, there are many times when we are too involved in the moment to capture with a camera. So, as you read, be aware this is just a glimpse into the love-filled, action-packed, reverent life of this kindergarten class.

Language arts:

We’ve been moving through the PAF phonics curriculum with increasing success. Students now have enough sounds under their belts to make, read, and write simple consonant-vowel-consonant words using the short vowel “a”. We introduced the tiny words “a” and “I” so now they can read and write simple sentences like “I had a cat and dad had a cap.” We are already emphasizing punctuation, uppercase letter at the beginning and period at the end, as well as discussing the concept of what is a sentence and what is a phrase. It’s normal for the kids to come at the material from all different places — there are those who know all the sounds our alphabet letters make (there are 45) and they can read. There are others who only know the letters and sounds we have introduced so far (12). Nonetheless, we work together for a time with review and handwriting practice and then we break into groups for more targeted instruction to meet each where he or she is at.

Other work:

Every day we sing, rhyme, tell stories, and play with language. The kids made Valentine’s cards for big buddies and their parents, wrote sentences about winter break to accompany their drawings, played with the movable alphabet to create words, read word lists and practiced spelling with all-class dictations.

math:

In math, the children made dice and played dice games. They began a study of 3D shapes by measuring and making a cardboard cube and learning the difference between a square and a cube. We’ve been working on place value, using the Montessori bead stair materials, and continuing to practice writing the numbers to 20, all facing the right way, with the tens and units digit on the correct side. They’ve been writing and solving simple number sentences and practicing counting by 10s and 2s. For 2s, they folded origami paper houses and counted how many feet they each had in their houses. They used number lines for addition and subtraction and practiced the concept of greater than, less than. We track the date on our class calendar, and review the days of the week and the months of the year, regularly.

Many of our math units revolve around a children’s story:

Snuffles, a story about a hedgehog, for an exploration of 3D shapes and measurement.
Ten Flashing Fireflies, a counting story to see all the ways two numbers can add up to 10
Teddy Bear Cures a Cold, a story about a bear who falls sick and the friends who help him (The kids measured bears using unifix cubes and later rulers, they sorted and graphed their bears and they went on a teddy bear picnic
The Napping House to begin exploring counting by twos and odd and even numbers

The goal is to keep math fun, hands-on, and connected to real word applications that matter to the kids. With the hedgehog project, we set up a store and gave each child 10 pennies to spend — they had to read signs, figure out how many of each item they got for a penny, and plan how to make decisions with limited funds. Then they decorated the cubes they’d made, the home for their clay hedgehogs. When you learn math like this, there is nothing laborious for boring about it!

Making dice and playing games.

Making cubes and shopping for their hedgehogs

science:

Watching M&Ms do their thing. The reward apart from watching the colors move — one to eat at the end. That’s more than enough!

Winter persimmon tree drawing — continuation of watching our tree through the seasons and creating observational drawings versus using the imagination, drawing what you see
Forest animals — study of homes underground including a hike to the redwood grove to look for animal homes
Bears and hibernation
Forces: Magnets and Gravity
The water cycle (made multi-media posters, sang the water cycle boogie by the Banana Slug String Band, water and color experiments, rain in a jar to look at evaporation and precipitation.

Experiments with water continued on the playground where the rain flowed through the campus and kids got to dig, dam, and float objects in the water.

The kids completed their second sewing project. They made winter gnomes using the whipstitch instead of the running stitch they used last time when they made pouches. They stuffed the gnomes using wool from our very own alpacas. They also made watercolor paper lanterns and made handles out of yarn they finger-knitted. Several kids have started weaving projects. Keep hands busy, always.