February/March/Beg. April in the Kindergarten Classroom
Hello Everyone,
The longer I wait to write this blog, the more daunting it gets as there is so much we’ve done and it’s hard to pick and choose what to feature. It ends up becoming a bit of a photo dump. This time I tried to use simpler formatting so hopefully everyone will be able to access the photos without too much fruitless wheel spinning.
The year feels suddenly almost over. We have so much we’d like to fit in and so little time. We can’t believe the time to say goodbye to this class is nigh. It’s been such a wonderful group and we’ve had great fun together. They are happy, sweet, kind, oh and they also have spring fever — it’s the time of year when cohesion falls to the wayside and the kids are excitable, distracted, loud and energetic. Rules are forgotten and mayhem is always close at hand. But that’s ok. It happens every year. It’s growing kids breaking out of kindergarten confines and ready to forge ahead into the grades. Sadly, Tavia will be moving to another school — she’ll be just down the road at Valencia and we hope for many visits and to stay connected. She’s a vibrant, strong presence in this group and we will miss her very much. Ok, curriculum…
math
Finding a worm to measure!
We’ve been giving the kids daily practice on writing their numbers to 10, all facing the correct way. Place value has been introduced into the teens, using Montessori manipulatives, and some are working on remembering their teen numbers and/or getting the tens digit on the right side of the units digit. They’ve done lots of adding with bead strings as well, trying to see how many ways to make 10, or 20, for example. And, they’ve used their home made dice to play adding games with Tara. She’s also introduced the calendar which gives lots of good practice with the numbers up to 31, as well as giving a chance to work on the names of the days of the week, and the months of the year.
The children are learning how to measure with rulers. They measured worms from the worm bin and then graphed the findings. We’ve done a long and involved unit on 3D shapes that included measuring to create a cardboard cube.
We’ve worked on concepts of greater than, equal and less than, and we’ve played math games like Connect Four, dominoes, and addition bingo.
The Snuffle’s project that came home just before spring break was a 3D math project that gave plenty of opportunity for hands on, applied math and peaked the imagination as well. The children heard a story about a hedgehog who is looking to build a new home. They then made their own Snuffles out of clay and toothpicks and constructed a homestead for their animal, using paper to make various 3D shapes (cubes, pyramids, cones etc.). They went shopping for decorations and had to read signs, figure out how to spend a limited number of pennies and figure out how much of each supply they could purchase with 10 pennies.
language arts
We do daily short and sweet phonics drills and handwriting practice and then separate into two leveled groups that switch between me and Tara. One group is working on letter and sound recognition, CVC words, a handful of sight words and reading some very basic sentences. The other group is reading phonetic books, practicing dictations (where the kids learn how to spell words by breaking them into phonemes), and also doing some sentence writing.
The buddies have come several times for visits to read to the children and most recently to share the poetry books they made. They wrote an acrostic poem together with their littles and had a great time with that. The first/seconds have also come to read homemade books and this has been a great inspiration for the kinders both to read and to make their own books..
science
Weather has been a topic on Tara days. The kids made water cycle posters with yarn, twigs and wool, and they made weather wheels. They did the cloud in a jar experiment. As it can go with science, the experiment didn’t work the first time and so there was another attempt which didn’t exactly produce a cloud but did show the steam evaporating and condensing. Conversation at the lunch table the other day was about just this: Liam was asking if the kids knew what a hypothesis was and someone piped up that it was when you try something. Such smart children! Eavesdropping on kindergarteners is one of the most entertaining parts of our job!
Anyway, we had lots of rain in real life and could see the watercylce process as our cold metal roof on the deck sent drops of water precipitating back down onto the deck after the warm moisture reached it.
The kids have also been studying birds, learning about different bird beaks and feet, where birds live and what they eat. We finished a chapter read aloud called The Night Fairy by Laura Amy Schlitz, featuring many garden creatures and scientific information about them, as well as opportunities for discussions about feelings and fears. It’s a very beautiful story, exquisitely written, and could work for much older kids too. Anyway, it’s about a fairy whose wings are crunched up mistakenly by a bat and she has a harrowing adventure in which she saves a hummingbird, discovering how to be selfless, kind, apologetic, brave and proud in the process.
They also learned about barn owls and dissected barn owl pellets, identifying the bones of various rodents and birds the owls had eaten the night before. See gallery below:
The observational work as scientists, where the children have been documenting the seasonal progress of the persimmon tree beyond the meadow, culminated in an observational self-portrait, where everyone examined their faces much as they’d carefully noticed all the details of the persimmon tree. Here they are fully engrossed in front of mirrors as they worked on their masterpieces. If you haven’t visited the classroom to guess which portrait belongs to your child, you must come next week. Or look here and figure it out. They are truly stunning works of art.
the finished products
cooking/gardening/handwork
We do these activities every Tuesday. In gardening, the children planted wheat grass baskets and have been watching them grow. They planted seedlings too of their choosing and then labeled and watered them. For cooking, we made bread the other day. It was an all day affair from bubbling yeast to waiting for the dough to rise to pounding and kneading it. It baked just in time for rest and as the kids settled down to wait for me to butter the freshly baked warm rolls (we used the leftover acorn flour they milled in the fall along with white flour) it started pouring with rain. It was an impressive, loud, hard rain, hitting the metal roof so forcefully that it could’ve been kind of scary. But, everyone got very quiet, wrapped tightly in their yoga blankets and munched on their rolls. It was a lovely few moments, so cozy and sweet, and I bet I’ll always remember that day. I wonder if any of them will…
Here they are working with the dough:
For sewing, the children made woodland felt gnomes and got practice with the whip stitch. Then they moved on to working with the running stitch and making pillows for rest time. About half have finished and this half gets to rest in luxury with a blanket AND a pillow. The other half are not far behind though and will finish next week. Their kindergarten pillows will come home at the end of the year to be treasured forever hopefully. They are filled with wool from our alpacas and lavender from our garden.
From Tara:
P.E.
The kinders love PE. We start each class by talking about how to be a good sport including not boasting about winning and how to say congratulations to the other team if you lose. We don’t play a lot of competitive sports and often play games where nobody gets out. They especially liked our field game day where the only competition was with themselves. The games included a broad jump, a bean bag toss, the balance beam and a timed run.
For Mateo’s birthday he turned our sharks and minnows tag game to praying mantis’ versus insects which the kids loved!
Bean Bag Fun: We used task cards to enjoy playing with bean bags and kids did activities like:
Toss bean bag above your head and catch it on top of your head.
-Catch behind your back.
-Place beanbag between your feet, jump up and toss the beanbag into your hands.
Try to catch three times in a row
High toss then spin around and catch it. Some of the bean bags landed in the rafters of the deck on this one. The kids had fun using brooms to get the bean bags down. Then it became a game to try and get your bean bag stuck.
And the most difficult was to lay down with your legs straight. Place the beanbag behind your head. Sit up, rock back and pick up the beanbag with your feet and return to a sitting position. Your kids are very flexible and had fun with this challenge.
Social Studies
We read the book, “Our Skin, A First Conversation about Race” and learned about different cultures and melanin in our skin. They learned how to make paper chain dolls and they used different skin color tones to make a diverse group of dolls.
Valentine’s Day:
The kinders had fun making Valentine’s cards, decorating their Valentine’s boxes (save these to bring back next year) and they got to decorate and eat Valentine cookies with their big buddies.
St. Patrick’s Day:
Cash’s Grandma Maureen came in and taught the kids about Ireland. She had a map of Ireland and showed them where she grew up. She brought pictures of the stone cottages and told an Irish Folk Tale. She taught us how to dance an Irish jig and made Irish Soda Bread to share with the kids. Kathleen did a puppet show about a leprechaun and St. Patty, and the kids were so excited to find leprechaun gold in the fairy garden. They did a
hidden picture worksheet and made a graph of their findings.
Back to Rosy…
Allison from the SPCA visited for the third and final time, this time with Po in tow, a rescue dog, to help the kids learn about animal safety. They practiced asking if they could pet Po, learned how to approach a dog and how to move around a dog, and looked at photos to learn when a dog is showing signs of fear or aggression as opposed to friendliness.
We celebrated Cash and then Mateo’s birthday. We will be celebrating the six remaining kids to have birthdays (Hallie in late May and then the rest are summer birthdays) on different days in our last weeks. I’ll be in touch with further instructions to parents of these kids. We like to give them their moment to shine, even if they happened to have been born when no one is at school. Being a summer birthday myself, I’m particularly sensitive to this!
And just because it’s a sweet photo