Winter is Here!

After a very warm winter thus far, colder weather is finally here!  The children have loved cutting snowflakes out of white paper, looking for ice on the playground, and dreaming of snow!  Please make sure your child has a warm winter coat, hat or hood, and gloves/mittens on these cold days.  We do go outside to play unless it is exceptionally cold.  

The new year has brought us a new science topic - magnets!  The children love to explore with the magnet set we have in the classroom and have made some wonderful discoveries about how magnets work.  We have watched kids science videos about magnets and have begun doing our own experiments.  The children have made predictions about how many objects they think a particular magnet will pick up and then tested this idea.  Magnets sure do pick up a lot of paper clips!  We counted the paperclips in piles of 10 - some magnets picked up over 70! 

            Life Skills - Connected and Respected 

This week in Life Skills we talked about kindness.  The children first brainstormed someone in their lives who was especially kind.  Then, as a whole Kindergarten we created a list of kind words and actions.  KA and KB are already experts at kindness - have you seen our Good Deed chains?  In each classroom the children report when someone has done a good deed for them.  We write it on a strip of paper which we then make into a paper chain hung around the room.  We are hoping to make the chains go all around the perimeter of the rooms by the end of the year.!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Peace

Our spiritual theme this month is "Peace" and we have been focusing on the life of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.  We read the story Martin's Big Words which detailed Dr King's life and his peaceful words and actions.  With our third grade reading buddies we decorated pieces of paper that had some of his important words on them.  These words and pictures with our buddies are out in the hallway for all to enjoy.  We learned that Dr King used his words to make changes in the world, not his fists.  He was able to fight back against adversity through peaceful protests and speeches.   We have had some wonderfully rich classroom discussions about Dr King - ask your children what they have learned!

Curriculum Highlights

Language Arts - Reading Horizons, letter sounds /n/, /p/, and /r/, slides with short vowels /a/ and /e/, adding to the Most Common Words list, punctuation.  Writing Workshop - publishing our first stories, Writer's Share, how to sequence a story or "how-to" book, creating covers for our books.

Math  - Number 10, creating 10 using different combinations of numbers, addition facts to 10, writing numerals and number words, word problems.

Science  - Magnets - "attract" vs "repel", experimenting with magnets, determining how strong magnets are, recording data, making predictions.

Social Studies - Roots - Sam, Johannes, Vivien, learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, I Dream of a World book and reflections, Martin's Big Words book and activity with Reading Buddies, talking about peace