Hoppin' Into Junior Kindergarten!

Hi JK parents!

We had an amazing time at The Grove!  Some children pet a snake, and all had such fun on the bus singing songs and chatting with their friends!  The rain came as we were almost ready to go, so we were able to enjoy our hayride and fun games before we picked out our pumpkins and loaded the bus!

We are learning more about farm animals and earned our ticket to the line by identifying if an animal was a farm or zoo animal.

Fine Motor:
The children completed barns with doors that open to reveal their picture, of them milking a cow!  They used glue sticks and peeled stickers to place them on their farm scene.  The children completed their October self portraits, viewing themselves in mirrors and then drawing themselves with colored pencils.  I love to see the progression through the year from their monthly self portraits!

Matching capital and lower case letters!

It's a runway!!

James' runway!!

 Our upper school buddy Rowan reading to the children!

 Our pumpkin in the Roycemore garden is so pretty!  

We stamped our names careful to begin with an upper case letter and fill in the rest with lower case letters.  

We found sticks outside and painted them, and decorated them with pom pons.  It was fun to see the different color schemes!  The placing of the pom pons is another great fine motor skill!

Literature:
The children continued their vertical writing of words on the white board, and also used large word boards to trace and then write sight words.  We rolled dice with Halloween related adjectives and nouns and had each child roll the dice.  They wrote about these "sad skeletons/embarrassed witch/excited pumpkin" etc. using inventive spelling/dictation and illustrated their story in their journals.  We talked about the different emotions and why their character might be feeling that way.  It was such a fun activity, combining gross motor, fine motor, literacy, fine arts, and social emotional skill building.

When using inventive spelling, it is wonderful for the children to use "stretchy snake" and stretch the word out by saying it very slowly and enunciating each sound they hear.  If they get the first and last letters in a word and write those it's great!  The vowels will fill in later.  For example, monster might be "mnr" or ghost might be "gt".  This is all part of the progression and should be encouraged.

Math & Science:
We practicing number counting and writing along with identification and using our number line to identify which numbers are less or more.  We count each day to determine the date, along with many other classroom items we count.  Comparisons are very important as they begin to learn the one to one correspondence of numbers. We have been categorizing buttons and other items and using these to help us count.

Have a great weekend!

Ms. Massey