News for the week of 3-31-08

We were so busy this week! We started new centers with lots of fun ideas for Pesach, like a frog jumping game that reinforced taking measurements. We continue to work on the rules for reading, I’m targeting the long vowels. It’s so nice to see the kids apply the rules they know and problem solve when they’re reading. I’ve also introduced using the apostrophe sign in a very minimal way. We talk about it in our morning message writing time and the kids are really catching on. We are writing about the butterfly lifecycle which has been so wonderful because the kids have seen it first hand in our classroom. We set our butterflies free and loved seeing them go. It was wonderful to watch the miracle happen right in our classroom and then complete our task of letting them go. A real shechyanu moment!

We had a fun science project learning about the frog life cycle and made models of frogs that actually change from a tadpole to a froglet to an adult frog. The kids loved this activity and we wrote about it also. They quickly understood that it’s truly a “circle of life” when looking at the frog diagrams. It was a fun project.

We completed a book using the old nursery rhyme “Over in The Meadow”, it was a great way to incorporate number writing, rhyming, and even addition! We talked a lot about estimating this week, I told them an easier way to think about it was to use the terms “guess then check”. We used estimating stations for math and they really enjoyed it. I had materials out and they had to switch stations and estimate how many they could hold in one hand, then they had to grab a handful and count them to check. One of the stations was tiny pebbles, this was very interesting. It was taking literally hundreds of pebbles to fill their little hands. This led me to teaching them how to make groups of something easier to count, like 5’s or 10’s, (we call this counting by nickels or dimes). I showed them that by grouping them separately they could then count their groups much easier, and count on if they had an incomplete group.
We will continue to work on estimating and move into number operations like simple addition and subtraction after Pesach break. I will begin with concrete examples and then move to using numbers.

We’re continuing with the same centers through Pesach and have so many fun things planned for next week, we can’t wait!

Shabbat Shalom!
Miss Christie and Morah Leah