News for March 4

News for March 4

This week we made sock puppets and did many activities with them.

Each student made a sock puppet by choosing buttons for eyes, yarn for the hair and giving the puppet a name. The children used the puppets to sing songs and to read together. As a class, we wrote out instructions on how to make a sock puppet. They were introduced to the four common words used in procedural writing: first, next, then and last. We also videotaped a movie that can be found at the end of this posting.

The children wrote in their journals a few times this week. The senior kindergarten students now are writing 4 plus word sentences. Most junior kindergarten students are writing at least one new word each time. We also learned the sounds and letter combinations for "ch" and "oo".

In math, we started the unit on data management. In kindergarten, the children are introduced to this method of information gathering, through answering questions by putting a marker on a graph. In our class, the students learned to retrieve a magnet with the first letter of their names and put it on the whiteboard graph in the appropriate place. We learned that most of the children in our class like pretzels, most like to eat candy, most know how to skate and everyone is in kindergarten!

The students had a chance to experiment with some new magnets and magnifying devices as part of our "I wonder" kit that our class has.






The students are having a lot of fun taking turns taking Corduroy the bear (morning class) and Frosty the snowman (afternoon class) home to visit with his/her family. Each morning, the journal is read aloud to the class and everyone looks at the picture that was drawn. Usually the star student takes the special bag home but, if there is an illness and a child misses a day of school, then we will keep the order of students, but your child may get it a few days after she/he was star student.

We read lots of books about monkeys this week. It started out by reading aloud books featuring sock monkeys (as a link to how we make toys out of socks) and then I kept finding books with monkeys as the main character. These books facilitated our discussions about imagination. The class knows that the imagination is located in the brain and we experimented with closing our eyes and "looking" at things using their mind's eye. As usual, more information about our read aloud books can be found at our sister blog at: http://planet5news.blogspot.com/.

Introducing.....our sock puppets! Here is a video of the students using the puppets they made this week.