Welcome back from Spring Break!

I missed this class and was happy to see smiling faces back at school!  We are jumping into spring and studying the life cycle of the frog, planting and blooming, tops bottoms and middle's of vegetables and which part (the root, flower, top etc.) we eat, along with many other plants coming to life this season.






Centers:
Fine Motor:  Cutting out birds and decorating with feathers, and building a nest for their home.  The children loved choosing colorful feathers and carefully placing them on their birds.  Their scissor skills continue to improve as they are able to cut careful and precise lines.

Math and Science:  The children measured themselves and counted inches, comparing their height to that of the first of the year.  We created a flower garden with flowers they painted to demonstrate their height with the stems of their flowers.  Understanding who is taller, shorter, more inches, less inches, etc. is a great way to compare and contrast with something that is meaningful to them.  We completed our April calendars and practice "riding the elevator to the top" to find the day of the week after finding the date.

Literacy:  Reading groups have been making our way through the decodable books, as well as high frequency books and the leveled readers.  The books that are easy for them to read or decipher based on pictures are great to begin any reading time, giving them confidence and warmed up for more challenging books.  We have been working in pairs and small groups in the classroom to provide a variety of fun activities centered around literacy/language arts.

Writing:  The students wrote books about seeds and the different stages in growing, writing common planting words and illustrating their books.   We will be planting several different vegetables and documenting their growth in journals.  If there are any of you with gardens or a green thumb that want to share any of your knowledge, we would love to have you.

We have a short week this week, as we are off on Friday for the holiday weekend,  as well as Monday (for Professional Development for the teachers).

Enjoy this beautiful weather!

Mrs. Massey

Hi JK Parents!

This week we stacked our cat's hat so high from all of the amazing reading we have done.  Thank you for your efforts at home supporting your children's reading habits.  Thank you for cheering for JK at Palio!  They were all such amazing athletes showcasing their gross motor skills.

Language Arts:

We continue to read our books in reading and writing groups and sound out words we don't know using our reading techniques.  The decodable books help children understand as they use repetition and similar words and word families along with rhyming words.  WE have also been constructing flowers and writing sight words on them to decorate our classroom door as we jump into our Spring theme.

Science and Math:

We continue to classify, group, and count different manipulatives at our math center.  The children measured and mixed play dough for St. Patrick's Day, green with glitter, as they strengthened their small muscle groups to increase fine motor skills.  We began discussing the life cycle of plants as we read about spring and growing things. The children sequenced pictures they colored and made life cycle collages.

Art/Fine Motor:

The children listened and followed multi-step instructions as they colored sight word school busses.
We all played a new game called "Art Studio" where students anonymously illustrate pictures on the white board and the art buyer then selects their favorite.  This exercise requires careful listening of detailed descriptions they have to replicate as their artwork.

We are all fine tuning our yoga poses, as we introduced the butterfly, flower, and frog this week.  It's such a calming activity where their focus and concentration is required.

Thank you for coming to celebrate the St. Patrick's Day season with the beautiful art of Irish Dance. Lila loved seeing her JK friends and sharing her passion!

Jr. Palio show and rehearsal photos of our amazing athletes!

Enjoy the rest of your break!  I am excited to begin the last part of our school year as the growth and learning comes together in our culminating activities.

Mrs. Massey

Welcome to March in JK!

We have been discovering or re-discovering the wonders of Dr. Seuss this past week.  The children have also been preparing for Palio, which will take place next Wednesday at 8:45 am in the gym. This Friday, March 10th will be an 11:30 am early dismissal day.  EDP will be available so just let us know if your child will be staying all day.

Center Time:

Literacy:  The children have written about what they would do if Thing 1, Thing 2 and the Cat in the Hat visited their house.  They used the phonetic spelling of words as they sounded them out to make words.  Their ability to identify the beginning and ending sound is wonderful at this developmental age/stage.  If they are able to identify some of the middle vowel sounds, they are learning the skills many children do not master until Kindergarten and beyond.  I am extremely proud of their progress and the stages at which they are currently learning.  Seeing their excitement when they name a letter sound and are then able to write it by themselves is rewarding to experience, and a joy to see.  Our reading groups continue to advance as we move through our leveled reading books and introduce reading strategies.

Math:  We have been playing a measuring game using non-standard units of measure (colored cubes) to measure different insects or items.  This allows them to also practice their counting and one-to-one correspondence.

Science:  Chef Swaby visited the classroom and led us through a dessert demonstration, creating whipped cream with chocolate ganache to then pipe onto cookies...changing the cream from a liquid to a semi-solid.  The children were as silent as mice as they watched with wide eyes and then sampled the delicious filling.  It was lovely to share the talents of one of our parents.  Please consider yourselves invited if there is anything you would like to share with us!  The children love having guests and getting to know their friend's parents!

Fine Motor:  We continue to refine our writing skills in our sign in each day, as the letters become more uniform in size, the spacing becomes closer and to scale, and the specific formation becomes more natural and requires less effort.  Our play dough time, using tongs and tweezers while at the sensory table, picking up items and sorting them, etc. all assist these fine motor skills to be refined. The "Handwriting Without Tears" program has specific language we use to instruct, by letting then know an "A" is a long line, long line, short line.  We also encourage all strokes to begin from the top and move downward.  Some letters require "jumpy frog", so begin with the initial stroke (such as the letter "p") and then "jump back up" to the starting point to continue the loop around.

We practiced our scissor skills in a scissor center, carefully cutting zig-zag, curvy and straight lines. We completed our calendars for March by cutting out gold coins for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  This also provided an opportunity to discuss the order of the colors of the rainbow and the reminder of ROYGBIV.

We enjoyed green scrambled eggs and ham, and danced around in PJ's, celebrating the accomplishments of the class along with the birthday of Dr. Seuss.

We have one more week before spring break, and then will be off for the last two weeks of March.  EDP will be available for the first week.  It hardly seems possible that it will be April when we return.  What a fast moving and dynamic year we are having!

Warm thoughts as we head into St. Patrick's Day celebrations this weekend with the downtown parade.  The weather is calling for snow, but for now, I am enjoying the 57 degree day and sunshine. My daughter will be one of the dancers with Trinity Irish Dance Company in the parade (noon start time!).  I will be following behind with the booster club, so look for us if you make it downtown on Saturday!  She will also be dancing at a few places in Evanston next Saturday.  I'll pass those along as well if you want to bring the kiddos to watch.  It's always fun and inspiring to see all of the talented dancers.

Mrs. Massey

Good afternoon JK friends and family!

Our class has been busy filling "buckets" with acts of kindness, and received certificates during our ceremony to celebrate this past week.  Each child has been collecting tickets in their envelope each time they filled a friend's bucket.  They decorated their certificates with stickers to signify the different ways they were caring and thoughtful.  I was so proud of the effort they showed in finding ways to make others happy.  We had a mini cotillion class where we read Manners and discussed how using good manners is another way to be kind to friends.  We made cards for our amazing kitchen staff, sang songs for them in our classroom.  They were touched to be remembered on Valentine’s Day by their favorite (so they tell us) children in the school!   

We had such a wonderful Valentine's Day party and season, decorating mailboxes, writing about people we love, decorating cookies and cupcakes, playing pin the heart on the Valentine, Valentine Bingo, and learning about St. Valentine.  

Language Arts, Science, Math and Fine Motor:  (Many of our activities, as usual, provide multimodal learning and include multiple areas of study within each activity!)

Our librarian visited our classroom and taught a lesson about volume.  The children experimented at the sensory table with water and containers to make comparisons and predictions.  We read Room for Ripley and multiple other books about friendship, manners, and Valentine's Day stories, providing examples of how we can help each other and become even better friends.  We made fish tanks with colorful tissue paper and filled them with our own Ripley from the story. The children illustrated and wrote about their favorite characters, focusing on a particular favorite scene.  They used their knowledge of letter sounds to provide the beginning and ending sounds of words, and worked on adding the middle vowels to CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.  The children are beginning to recognize some of the blends and are becoming more familiar with more popcorn words.  The Bob Books and Reading A-Z (Raz) Books continue to help us during our reading groups to advance in our letter and word recognition, and become more fluid in reading practices.  

Additional Math:

Along with learning about volume, we practiced our numbers as we counted sweethearts and other Valentine themed manipulatives.  The children sorted, categorized, and summarized the items and then answered questions about which was more, less, the most and the least. 

They all enjoy writing numbers on the white boards, and playing games with number finds.  It's great practice to use the calendar to work on the one to one correspondence and locate numbers and then count different blocks to represent that number.  

Building on our Dr. Seuss theme, and using Green Eggs and Ham, we used a spatula to flip green (paper) eggs with different numbers written on them, while sharing with our friends which number we were flipping, into a bowl.  They love playing games and sharing their knowledge with friends.  

Additional Language Arts: 

Dr. Seuss has given us multiple ways to practice our rhyming words.  The children loved the story of the Lorax,, and making their very own Lorax’s.  We have also read There's a Wocket in my Pocket, and I Can Read with my Eyes Shut!  They laughed at all of the lovable animals in Wocket in my Pocket, like the Nink in the Sink and Zamp in the Lamp.  We all wanted to adopt these amazing characters!  The enjoyable singsong prose and easy and silly words make these books great predictable stories to assist them with their confidence in reading.  

We have new Dr. Seuss games and puzzle the children are excited about.  We will celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday with a culminating activity Friday including feasting on green eggs and ham (for those who wish to try it-no ham for our vegetarians!)  The children once again filled the frog jar, so have earned another pajama party.  We will include this in our Friday celebration, so please have them wear their favorite pajamas and come to school ready for lots of silly Dr. Seuss style fun!  

Mrs. Massey