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

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