News for week of 10-29-07

We started theme 3 this week, which is all about Family! It’s great because it fits so well with the Thanksgiving holiday. We started talking about generations in families and read stories that had this theme. We read a story titled Tortillas and Lullabies and the kids loved it, it’s a lovely story about a great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and a little girl and her doll. They all make tortillas through the years and generations, and they are all the same, but different. We had lots of discussion about it and the kids liked finding the details in the story. We also made homemade tortillas, the kids gobbled them up!! They turned out great, it’s so nice to be able to do these things with the kids, as it reinforces the learning so well. It also brings up the discussion about the literature at another time, which also reinforces the learning.

Center Time:
We worked on the letter “Tt” this week and listened to Tikki Tikki Tembo, a Chinese legend about a little boy and his brother. It is a wonderful perspective on family and gave the students another perspective on a culture they may not have known. By the end of the week, the kids were chanting the book! The kids are working on increasing their sight word knowledge, we’re working on I, see, and my. They may not be able to “read” them, but they can recognize them as they are exposed to them more. We add words as their letter knowledge increases, its part of the reading continuum that we build on when learning to read.
Writing:
We’re continuing to work on labeling pictures we draw. This week we drew family pictures and labeled the family members. We also wrote lots of sentences during center time. The students are learning that letters make sounds and sounds make words, and separate words make sentences. It seems like such an easy concept to an adult, but it’s not part of who a child innately is. It is a foreign concept that has to be learned. It’s just like learning that written print (even scribbles) represents spoken words.
Math:
We worked more with symmetry of letters, it was tough! The kids used sticky letters on a chart to decide what kind of symmetry the letters had. It was very interesting because the students really understood the concepts of symmetry; they could quickly show horizontal, vertical, diagonal and rotational symmetry, and even knew the correct words to use. It was so great! This came through being exposed to the concept of symmetry many times in different ways. We will continue this through the year. Math is never completed; we will continue to revisit concepts even when the children seem to know them very well. They need to know the concepts in varied situations to truly understand the meaning. The math program we use is also fun because the students don’t know they are learning math. They think they’re playing with sticky letters on a chart!

We had a very special visitor in our classroom on Monday. Her name was Morah Efrat from Israel. She’s a music specialist that travels the world teaching how children can learn so many skills through music. She loved our students and did a wonderful activity with them using the music “Le Carnaval des Animaux” which translates to “Carnival of the Animals”; the song she shared with us was “Aquarium”. It was amazing to see her working with the students; she kept their interest for more than 30 minutes! For a Kinder, that’s a LONG TIME! They loved the music so much, and used instruments to play with the music at different times, they pretended they were fish and acted the parts, then she brought out an ocean of netting and they were fish and fishermen. It was an amazing experience for the children. I found a book by John Lithgow using the same piece of music relating it to a little boy stuck in a museum overnight, and we listened to that the rest of the week. It was perfect timing because we hung our fish to swim in our room the next day!

It was a great week, and even though we were very busy, it was lots of fun!