January 25th

It's official - the year is halfway over. I am very proud of these hard working kindergarteners. 
The children enjoyed having their bear friend at school last week. Each child introduced their bear to the class and everyone needed to listen carefully because afterwards, the bears were matched to their owners. We learned some bear poems, heard bear stories and sorted bears by looking at different attributes. After listening to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, we put our bears into three groups; wee little bears, medium sized bears and great big bears. Next we completed a graph to see how many there were in each group. The children found the length of their bear using blocks to measure and compared the weight of their bear with a friend's bear. Finally, the children wrote a sentence or two describing their bear.

This week some time was spent learning about the importance of Martin Luther King Jr.  As a social experiment, only blue-eyed children were given a candy with no further explanation from me. Then after a few minutes, (and some teary-eyed brown eyed children), we discussed the fairness of this situation.  This lesson was followed up by a story about the life of MLK – and candy for all.  

Enjoy the photos from Bear Week!

Happy New Year! I can't believe it's 2015! Here's a little fun fact. Did you know that 2015 is the year that Marty McFly and Doc travel to in the movie Back to the Future II? I am probably dating myself, but when this movie first came out, 2015 seemed so far away - but here we are!!

The children seemed happy to be back at school and we have returned to a pre-holiday routine. The children started off the week completing  class project about their New year's resolutions. There are some pictures below.

Last week's story of focus was The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. We worked on story elements and sequencing the events. We also completed a picture and writing project about looking outside on a snowy day. This combine writing with the newest sight word, "it' and using the question mark. In math, we have begun a unit on subtraction.

As we near the end of the second grading period, some kindergarten skills will be assessed.  Some math skills assessed will be counting to 100, counting by 10’s, reading and writing numbers to 20. They will also be asked to name the letters and sounds and to read the sight words. (sight word list: can, my, am, are, I, a, see, you, the, like, to, we, are, it, is blue, red, yellow, green, purple, orange, black, brown, white, pink)

Looking forward to warmer temps this week! :)