We have had so many exciting adventures these past few weeks! I'll highlight our special events first:
Global School Play Day
Global School Play Day is intended to bring attention to the importance of unstructured play time to help students foster relationships, practice problem solving skills, innovation, and imagination. We had a great time learning together through play!
100th Day of School
On Valentine's Day, we also celebrated the 100th day of school! We practiced making 10 groups of 10 in various ways, like using 10 different colors of noodles to make necklaces, using 10 different colors of paint to paint 100 gumballs on a gumball machine, and comparing our collections of 100 items. It was so interesting for us to observe the differing volumes in the same size bottles, depending on the size of the objects we each chose for our collections! We also did a special writing activity, where we shared what we would buy if we had one hundred dollars to spend!
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day was full of love and friendship! A huge thank you to our Room Representative, Mrs. Closs, for planning our exciting party, and volunteers Mrs. Kuhn, Mrs. Simpson, Mrs. Carroll, and Mrs. Tauber for making the party a great success! The kindergarteners had such a fantastic time.
Bee Bots
Through a generous grant from the ABC25 foundation, our kindergarten team acquired a set of Bee Bots! These fun and friendly little robots are a great way for our kindergarten friends to practice their sequencing and problem solving skills to program the robots to follow a path of their choosing. We also developed our skills in working together as a team to accomplish a common goal. After we spent time familiarizing ourselves with the Bee Bots and how to give them commands (entering a pattern of direction cues using the arrow buttons on the top of the robot), we moved our Bee Bots to the grid to program them to move to specific books listed on the grid. The room was buzzing (pun intended!) with excitement as we tested our coding skills to see if the Bee Bots traveled the path we set for them. I think we have many future computer programmers in our bunch!
Art Appreciation
Ms. Madsen also visited us this week to teach our Art Appreciation lesson for the month! She introduced us to the French painter, Georges Rouault. We studied his painting,
Profile of a Clown, and compared his painting style to the look of stained glass windows. The students made observations about how we typically envision clowns, to the sad clown in the painting. Next, we had the chance to create our own clown themed drawings. It was neat to see the creativity that each student displayed in their artwork!
Read Aloud Visitors
Two special Dryden staff members visited to read aloud to our class recently! Mrs. Kenney joined us on World Read Aloud Day with the charming story,
Teriffic by Jon Agee. Mrs. Sessler visited to read
The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig. The kindergarteners made connections to the story and shared ideas for how they may include students who are feeling lonely or left out. Such compassionate little ones we have in our bunch!
All About Me weeks
We loved learning more about Milla, who shared with the class a dolphin, which is her favorite animal, along with her favorite movie, "Dolphin Tale". She also brought her sister Joanna's favorite toy, and let us know that she loves her baby sister, which went right along with the baby doll she also included in the bag. She said that she likes real babies, as well as playing with baby dolls. Although a dolphin is her favorite animal, she included a stuffed dog to represent her love of dogs as well. Milla's mom came in to read us the funny book,
If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff.
During Samantha's week, we learned that she loves to sing, and has a special microphone that she uses to make her performances pop! She also included her favorite little pop star figurine. She shared with us an adorable drawing she did of her family, including her mom, her dad, baby sister, and two dogs. Finally, she included a zebra puzzle piece because she said she enjoys puzzles and also loves zebras. Her mom joined us to read the sweet book,
In My Heart: A Book of Feelings, by Jo Witek.
Finally, we had the opportunity to hear all about Tegan! We learned that she loves the movie, "The Secret Life of Pets", and she even has a stuffed Gidget, her favorite character from the movie. She shared a few of her favorite toys, including her baby doll and her Pikachu and other Pokemon friends. We were able to see a picture of her from a friend's birthday party at Chuck E Cheese, along with a special light up rose she got from another fun outing to Medieval Times. Finally, we learned that one of her favorite books is
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and that she enjoys reading!
Math
During math, we have been learning about the addition symbol, and spent time creating our own addition number stories. We also did a roll and record activity, where we rolled two dice and recorded the sum on a chart, to see which numbers we reached most frequently.
We made predictions about whether or not the groundhog would see his shadow on February 2nd, and graphed and analyzed our results!
We also used the magic pen to demonstrate how much we have learned about patterns, as we completed shape patterns.
Reading
During Reading Workshop, we have been focusing on non fiction text, and learning about the text features that help us to understand non fiction selections.
We learned that there are different types of non fiction texts, depending on the type of information the author is presenting. We discovered that when we read non fiction books written about a person, it is called a biography. The biography,
Me... Jane by Patrick McDonnell, written about Jane Goodall, also taught us that sometimes non fiction books have illustrations, rather than photographs. This book was written in the form of a story book, telling us the story of Jane Goodall's extraordinary life.
Next, we focused on our questioning skills with the book I See a Kookaburra! by Robin Page and Steve Jenkins. We practiced asking relevant questions with our turn and talk partners, using the suggestions below to help guide our questioning to better understand the text.
Finally, as we prepared for the Presidents' Day holiday, we spent some time learning about the life of George Washington. We had a great time creating a special George Washington craft to go along with our study!
I hope everyone enjoyed the beautiful weather on this long weekend, and I cannot wait to see my kindergarten friends back at school tomorrow!
