Hoppin' Into Junior Kindergarten!

Good afternoon JK parents!

We are studying Autumn and the changing of the seasons this week, and are all excited about Halloween already!

 Sticker placement is a great exercise for fine motor skill improvement!  

Ms. Liubin with her baby, all dressed up... thanks to JKers!  

Our spider counting game is loads of fun and the children are practicing their counting and adding with manipulatives while loving socializing with their friends!

Math and Science:

We are conducting an experiment with Indian Corn, and have talked about what will happen if submerged in water for a week.  We are making predictions and documenting the progress each day.  Some of the children predict the corn will turn into pop corn, or shrink, or dissolve like jello!  Testing our ideas is so much fun.  We played a game with fruits and vegetables you would harvest and counted them and then wrote the corresponding number with our dry erase markers.  

We are using our time line to count and write our numbers.  We are also using manipulatives to help us with our counting.  Our sensory bin provides another center for studying fall objects.  

We went on a scavenger hunt for fall items outside, and talked about all of the changes we see in our environment.  

There are numerous benefits to writing on a vertical surface.  We write on the white board daily to develop literacy skill!  Our writing center is always full of words to copy, accompanied by pictures to help the children identify the object and letter sound.  Please follow this article to learn more about the benefits!  

 https://theinspiredtreehouse.com/motor-skills-and-more-working-on-a-vertical-surface/

Tracing our letters with a dot at the start point is great practice for our tripod grip and letter formation.  It is incredibly hard to begin at the top when forming letters, because children naturally want a baseline from which to start!  It takes lots of practice to form the good habit of starting from the top.

 We are working on using only lower case letters when appropriate.  These letters tend to be more curvy so more challenging for early childhood, but the correct way to write now benefits their reading and literacy as they move to Kindergarten!  White board provides a fun and new way to practice writing!

We are learning about the changing of the seasons, and everything that happens when the weather becomes colder.  The children are using their fine motor skills here to write and glue, following three step instructions.  We completed a chart as a class classifying things that happen in each season.  Some of our art work will have the class doing similar things, so their finished products look the same.  Sometimes their art will be completely different and they will have the freedom to follow whichever creative path they choose!  Please ask me about any specific projects and I will let you know which skill it is encouraging.  It is all with reason and intentional.

Have a wonderful weekend! I am off to an Irish Dance competition with Lila.  She is pictured below with her other love, which is soccer!  She's the second to the right of the trophy!  My weekends are full of driving her around for sure.

Here's Lila on the left with her BFF Izzy at the St. Patrick's Day Parade!  She is a little bigger now!

Ms. Massey