PJ Party Day!
Happy Pajama Party Day! We have had such a wonderful time mostly just socializing with friends and playing games! We watched a portion of a movie called "Penguins, Spy in the Huddle" where a camera is designed to look just like a penguin and "lives" among them for a year. They interact and follow it, as it allows us to see up close the life of a penguin without disrupting their natural behavior. It was incredibly interesting, and the kids loved it! It's on Netflix if you have an interest!
We practice our sight words each day as we do the sight word jump from number to number in our classroom!
Math and Science:
We compared the heights of different penguins and lined up in order from tallest (Emperor) to shortest (Fairy/Little Blue) children to represent the penguins. We discussed the different places penguins live (cold or hot climates) and which penguins live in Antarctica, Australia, South Africa, South America, Galapagos, and Antarctica. Taller, shorter, bigger, smaller, and other physical characteristics are wonderful for the children to truly understand the different penguins as they relate how the penguins are "like" and "different" from them.
The children played a math game this week with frogs and practiced adding using the frogs/manipulatives. They used writing sheets to practice their number writing with friends through their game. We have also been studying coins and are working on learning the basic identification and numeric value of the penny, nickel, dime and quarter. No one has mastered them but all are becoming familiar with the dime and penny for starters. This is another skill typically introduced in Kindergarten that I like to introduce in JK. Feel free to discuss at home as well and have them separate coins and categorize. We counted and counted and counted some more, as we discussed and played games with the teen and twenty numbers. They love becoming little teachers as they write on the white boards and take turns assisting us during number study.
Literacy/Language Arts:
We worked on the letters N and O in our Word Books, and read high frequency word books in book groups along with penguin books word and letter searches. We completed Response to Reading pages today with our reading buddies. They always check out books for their JK buddies and bring them to read. It is such a nice class to interact with, and the children love their visits! We have read many books this week, including: If You Were a Penguin, Emperor Penguins, Antarctica, Penguin Chick, Penguins Face to Face, Penguin's Big Hill, Antarctic Antics, Antarctica, The Penguin Book-Birds in Suits, Polar Wildlife, Penguins (A Bobbie Kalman Book), Who Lives in the Arctic?, Little Penguin and non-penguin related, Gaston and Going Places! We continued our writing journals answering "If I Were a Penguin" question.
Fine Motor:
We cut out and created penguin pictures in our Art/Fine Motor center this week. We also created kit Penguins and placed them on winter scenes we designed.
We will begin our weather study next week!
Have a lovely weekend!
Ms. Massey
