Hoppin' Into Junior Kindergarten!

Hi JK parents!

What an amazing Halloween party and carnival!  Thank you for the goodies you brought and for celebrating at the carnival with us!

 French class!!

 Pin the nose on the pumpkin!

 Searching for the hidden spiders in the shaving cream!  

We are finishing up our farm theme this week and moving into Bats and Halloween.

Math:
We played a barn dice number game where we rolled dice and stamped numbers, and then practiced writing and tracing numbers.

 This is one more photo from the grove and our friend the Corn snake!

Hole punches and staplers are amazing for building those small muscles in the hand and improving fine motor skills.  

This was a game of "duck, duck, goose!" the children organized themselves on the playground!  This is such a big step as they are forming friendships and able to communicate their own ideas to each other, playing by the rules of a game.

 Journal pages and illustrating and writing about our hay ride at The Grove!  

Literacy/Science:
We completed a chart as a class about what we know about bats, what we want to learn, and then what we learned (KWL Chart).  Charting is extremely beneficial in early childhood as children are able to see results of their ideas and see they are being heard and their answers and input matter.  KWL Charts, Venn Diagrams, Tally Mark Charts, T Charts...these will all be a part of our classroom through the year.  The children talked about how bats are scary and bite people, so we read many books about the helpfulness of bats and how beneficial they are to controlling many insect populations.  We also learned that bats are not birds but are mammals and how they use echolocation to find their food and way around at night.  We read a story, Songbird,  about a baby bat and how he/they are very different from birds.

We talked about letters versus words and learned about finger spaces when writing words.  Please encourage them to write at home, even if they are pretend writing!

The children completed journal pages about our trip to the Grove Pumpkin Lane and practiced their inventive spelling as they sounded out words like "hayride" and "pumpkin".  They also dictated their stories as we wrote them.

Math:
We sorted many items by size and color along with working on our patterns through beats and music.  Our rhythm sticks are entertaining but help us count syllables too!

Fine Motor:
The children used sponges to paint bats.  The tiny sponges provide a great way to grasp with their fingers working on the fine muscle strength.  We are also using staplers, hole punchers and shape punchers to work on our fine muscles in our hands.  I love putting out raw supplies and giving the children a theme and then watching as they design amazing projects!  We also made name skeletons and added bones and bows!  We are talking about our skeletal system and how the bones in our hands are similar to a bats skeleton.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Ms. Massey