Friday, December 15, 2017

Good afternoon JK Families!

This week we continued our Gingerbread theme and discovered many new stories about all of the Gingerbread man's friends! 








 Counting, sorting, writing, and categorizing are so much more fun with friends!
 Letter sounds and filling in the missing letter!

 I love building things and wishing Lightening McQueen were really here with me!


 Reading together is so much fun!  Taking picture walks and telling our own stories is wonderful!

 Our mittens with inventive spelling words. 


Measuring, mixing, rolling, cutting, baking, cooling, decorating, repeat!  So fun! 

They are coloring in the missing items of the snowman as they learn the Spanish words for all of the extra items of clothing they need now that Winter is here! 
 Practicing colors in Spanish also provides pattern practice and sequencing! 
 They ALL love their Word Books!  They ask to do them each day.  It's so fun for me to see them writing and illustrating the pages and feeling so grown up as they diligently work through them. 



 The children are learning beats and notes as they build a foundation for reading music. 


Fine Motor/Literacy:
We designed Mittens after reading "The Mitten", and used inventive spelling to describe what we feel when we put our mittens on our hands.  The children colored, cut and then wrote their words on their mittens.  "Coze" was one of my favorite spellings, and "wmis" for "warmish".  We talk about the characters and settings in the stories and what we think will happen next.  We also hunt for letters and words as we read.  We are making some presents for you for the holiday, so have also been working on those in our fine motor/art center.  They are so cute and wonderful.  I hope you love them as much as I do!  The children are excited to share them with you! 





We worked in our word books, had group reading, individual reading, individual sign in, letter sounds group songs and dancing, fill in the letter center, and writing pages.  Writing practice remains interesting if we are constantly offering different tools, mediums, and ways to write and practice our letters and numbers.  We work on our writing tripod grip daily as well.  I am an avid student of the research for everything early childhood, so have read many articles lately about grippers for pencils, size of pencils and crayons, and what is the most beneficial for developing a proper tripod hold.  The most important thing to remember is to work on the hold and not get hung up on the device you are using to write.  Many articles recommend using regular size pencils because the chubby pencils provide too much space between the index finger and thumb and cause children to have too tight of a grip applying too much pressure, which effects their handwriting abilities.  Short (golf) pencils are great to limit the space available and encouraging less fingers on the pencil.  Grippers are sometimes helpful but in most cases are recommended by OT when a child has severe writing problems and the physical issues are causing them difficulty with being able to even hold a pencil.  Transitioning between chubby pencils and regular pencils is typically not necessary if you begin writing with regular pencils, ensuring the pressure applied when writing is not different.  Also, grippers can be uncomfortable, so when used should always be comfortable and not restrict normal range of motion while writing.  Also, when a child is not developmentally ready to hold a pencil they should not be expected to develop proper tripod grip.  The gripper will not make a difference in this instance.  Grippers that that are soft and do not restrict movement uncomfortably, but provide a fun and different spin to an ordinary pencil may encourage writing, which is always a positive.  Mixing up the different colors of pencils and markers, providing every medium for practicing writing, coloring and drawing are great ways to keep children interested.  I love writing centers with stamps, markers, crayons, lined paper, colored paper, words to copy and magazines to cut and paste. 

And just when you thought I was finished, here is a link to an older article but quite interesting about pencil grip. 
https://www.oepf.org/VTAids/Handwriting.pdf

Math/Science:
We made a surprise with cinnamon salt dough, measuring each ingredient carefully and discussing the difference between wet and dry ingredients.  The measuring cup is different for wet and dry ingredients, and it was fun watching them process why one would be better than the other for flour or water.  Cooking and baking always provides multiple opportunities for comparisons of more or less than, as well as temperature/numbers and counting while we time our baking. 

The children did another "turn and talk" math game where they responsively count to 100 with a buddy.  It's a fun and exciting way to practice numbers and allows children to be leaders as well as learn from their peers when they are stuck.  It provides the safety of practicing with a friend so mistakes are shared, and the socialization of compromising when they are unsure and deciding where to begin again.  I love "turn and talks" as a tool for teaching and introducing higher level thinking concepts. 

We have begun discussing coins, and how much each coin is worth.  This is new for  most all of the students, and is typically (at other schools) a skill introduced in Kindergarten.  Some children are becoming familiar with coin recognition, but are learning the amounts of each.  I love to introduce concepts so they are familiar and the for some children their interest level will lead them to more in depth study at this time.  For others, they will be familiar later when they study currency and have the advantage of it being a familiar concept. 

We have worked to show acts of kindness and build the Grinch's heart this week.  It's nice to introduce new motivators throughout the year.  They are all excited to build their rainbows, but providing an additional element is fun. 

Our higher level thinking and the gifted model incorporated into our everyday curriculum continues as the children answered all kinds of questions about themselves and made comparisons to their peers.  All of my classes have had many opportunities to explore questions that are typically reserved for older children, but the amazing uninhibited thought processes of four and five year old children remains my favorite for just this reason.  I remember a class a few years ago answering my question about the age old, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"  It is just amazing to hear the reasoning of, "of course the chicken had to come first because he had to lay the egg", to them turning to, "well, that chicken was laid by an egg so the egg was just put there, so of course the egg came first!" 

We will be baking Gingerbread cookies on Friday, and (if you are not already familiar with the scavenger hunt) we will be looking for the cookies around the school if they happen to run away!  It's such an amazing and fun day for the children, full of wander and excitement, and a lovely way to end the year before a long break.  I will miss them and will look forward to introducing them to the world of penguins when we return. 

Happiest of holidays to you all if I do not see you this next week!  And Happy New Year! 

Ms. Massey


Monday, December 11, 2017

Good morning JK families!

This week we have begun our Gingerbread theme.  It hardly seems like December but there is definitely a little magic brewing around the classroom as the children are getting excited for upcoming holidays and the change in the season.






Literacy:
I had each child read to me this week one on one as well as reading groups.  It's nice to have time to really study the process as they decipher letters and sounds, and allow them extra time to answer questions and find answers without any interruptions or assistance from friends.  Early childhood teachers meet monthly (as well as informally often) to discuss strategies and ensure cohesion in our curriculum from one grade to the next.  We began using whole body letter writing as a result of this week's suggestion from our Lower School Learning Assistance teacher.  Allowing each student to sky write letters crosses the midline.  It's lovely that we have such wonderful resources from which to learn.  We continued our journal pages and sign in using Handwriting without tears.  The biggest daily struggle for early learners is beginning at the top for letter formation.  It's human nature to want a baseline from which to begin.  Practice is key, so we continue to remind each student to "start from the top". 

We read many holiday and Gingerbread stories this week, including How to Catch Santa, Gingerbread Baby, Gingerbread Man, Still Running, Snowman's Christmas, Mrs. Greenberg's Messy Hanukkah, Berlioz The Bear, Small Medium and Large, The Gingerbread Bear and Keep Running Gingerbread Man. 

























Math and Science:
We completed a science experiment on water and how it effects paper Gingerbread people.  We submerged three different Gingerbread people in water for one minute, five minutes and 30 minutes, and recorded observations as we compared and noted differences.  The children first offered predictions and we discussed what a hypothesis is.  They also wanted to name the different paper people.  For young children, inanimate objects are also real so teaching empathy carries over to objects.  It's great to teach respect for even paper people as that transfers to real relationships.
We practiced our number counting, and played a Math addition game as a center this week.  Using frogs as manipulatives, the children rolled dice and wrote and added two numbers to play the game.

We talk about many math related questions in our morning and afternoon meetings, including comparison on bigger or greater than and less than numbers, further encouraging the one to one correspondence and meaning of each number.  We compare relational and sequential people and items, for example, "who is beside and behind Evelyn", or,  "who is taller than Emma but shorter than Kai". 

Fine Motor:
We made Gingerbread people using glitter, ribbon, sequins, tissue paper, markers, and anything else suggested.  It's fun to see the many creative ways the children choose to decorate their people.  We color and cut each day during free play, and also paint most mornings with either water colors or tempera paints.  We offer different size brushes, different colors for mixing, different kinds and colors of paper each day as we experiment with textures and brush strokes.  We also decorated foam Gingerbread people with stickers and hung them in our classroom-thank you Kai for sharing this craft with your friends! Each child also decorated a gingerbread house with stickers and added to their pictures with packages they decorated with tape and crayons. 

We have had a few children sick with fevers and vomiting.  We are careful to clean well and hand wash often, but know sometimes it just happens.  I will not hex us by saying that there have not been any lice instances in this classroom and with 20 children that's really wonderful, because the moment I say it they will find a way to us.  :)

Have a wonderful week, and thank you for letting me share time with your children.  It's my pleasure.  And, I should also share that our specials teachers LOVE this class as well.  They always comment about what a wonderful class this is, so it's not just me being bias.  Your kids are truly wonderful.

Ms. Massey