Hoppin' Into Junior Kindergarten!

 Hi JK Parents.

We began our week tracing and coloring different items in art class to create collage pictures.  Tracing is a difficult skill for JK and requires that left-right brain crossing the midline as they hold the item and trace it at the same time.  

The children love their classroom jobs, and are extremely comfortable leading the class as they count, read or sing!  

Fine Motor:

We are playing different games as we move pumpkins with tweezers to different containers as we work on our fine motor skills.  

The children made vampire goodie bags for Halloween, glueing each piece onto their bag and choosing to make it happy or scary.  

We were so excited to see snow flakes on Monday and Tuesday!  We were dancing around the room!  It was so fun.  Please be sure you send snow pants and boots to school everyday, as even if it's not snowing the playground is wet and cold so we will be wearing snow pants everyday.  Also, please replenish clothes if you haven't sent winter extra clothes and socks.  

Guided drawing with spiders!  

Guided drawing encourages multiple skills, including listening, hand-eye coordination, ability to replicate images, scaling to fit in a particular size, modeling, adjusting, and then knowing how to draw something and being able to teach that to someone else.  We completed a guided drawing for spider webs and the children did a wonderful job, and loved having their own spider to fit onto the web.  

Math and Science/STEAM (I love STEAM activities as they also incorporate the Art aspect of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math!)

We completed a hidden message experiment from the upper school students, using a secret solution!  The kids loved seeing their message from the older Griffins!  We talked about the solution necessary to activate the messages, which contained baking soda/base to activate the marker/acid.

The students extended their 3-D shape-making, using marshmallows and toothpicks to make cubes and then join triangular prisms to make little houses.  A few of the marshmallows disappeared in the process.  :). 

Middle School Kiddos!  Lila is on the right dressed as an amine character!  

I caught her eyes half closed but it adds to the spookiness of her amazing bat costume!  :)  

Who ya gonna call!!  :)

Ms. McGuire was an incredible recess helper!  We heart her!  

Dry ice and creepy punch with spiders!  This was our wishing potion as we ended our day of fun! 

We filled 10's frames as we moved candy corn into different compartments after rolling dice.  

Literacy:

We wrote journal pages after choosing Halloween themed cut outs and then writing/dictating stories about the trick-or-treaters or pumpkins, bats, spiders etc.  I love hearing all of the creative stories!  We talked about ending and beginning sounds of words as we used Heggerty Phonics to add ing and er and est to words.  

French:

The children played a memory game with Halloween Themed characters, and sang songs about animals in French.  We had French class in our classroom which seemed a bit more comfortable than in the morning room.  They love their cozy classroom and feel at home here.  

Gross Motor:

I was laughing as the children had bouncy ball races in PE!  Coach Chanan rocks out with them and it's just hilarious to see them playing air guitar as they dance around.  I am sure the cars driving by love seeing the laughter and fun of kids playing and exercising!  

Have a wonderful Halloween!  

Ms. Massey