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

News for week of March 24th

The kids are already getting excited about Pesach which we will be starting on Tuesday, April 1st. We finished last weeks centers so we could start something new for the next two weeks. We started writing about the changes we are seeing in our butterflies, they have gone into their cocoons and are just “hanging” around-ha,ha! We’re waiting for them to emerge into Painted Lady butterflies around Pesach, when we set them free.

We have continued our writing about spring and the changes we’re seeing in the weather, not only the temperature and wind but also the sights and sounds that are all part of spring. We talked lots about the birthdays we’ve had lately and how the kids were also once spring babies. They thought that was so funny, I don’t think they ever imagined themselves as being babies like all the babies we’re now seeing.

In math we’re working on money which is sometimes very abstract and hard to grasp. I decided to use other parts of their world to talk about parts of a whole (fractions) to help them understand this concept at a more personal level. We took a pizza picture and I cut it into 10 parts, and we discussed how, though it was cut into 10 pieces it made a whole pizza. We then counted the pieces in different ways, by 1’s, 5’s and then by starting with 5 pieces and “counting on” by 1’s, to get to the 10. They seemed to enjoy this because it looked like a puzzle and so I’ll make this into a center for additional practice.

We also did a fun math activity involving chocolate, even better! I brought up the idea of measuring with our hand to introduce estimation. This was a huge discussion and there were lots of ideas (for several days), some of the ideas were: use tape to keep the objects in place, only use things that wouldn’t fall off your hand, count one by one but never get the whole amount, keep the things in your pocket, but what if you don’t have pockets…the list continues. It was so interesting to hear their thoughts. I let them think about it for a day and we came back together to discuss what they came up with.
Then for a math activity, I read the book The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, and we decided to measure by drawing our hand and then putting the objects into the drawing, problem solved, nothing can fall off! The kids then got to measure their hand using Hershey Kisses, first making a guess and then checking their work.

You may be asked some questions about recipes because we started working on a special project for Mother’s Day which is right around the corner, it’s supposed to be a surprise so don’t ask too many questions…also, save the date for the morning of May 9th, we want to have a visiting day for mom, I’ll get you more information as it gets closer.