Valentine’s week brought some stories about friendship, love, and making Valentines for others. Students decorated Valentine mailbags for our party and the final students finished up their I love you sign language stuffed hands with Rose.
During sign language Rose went through the alphabet, showing the signs for mammals that began with each letter. She read and signed the Piggy and Gerald story A Big Guy Took My Ball.
We grated soap and unrolled and tore up rolls of toilet paper then added water to make clean mud, a mushy mixture that we could form and mold and mash.
Makenna continued our discussion about negative and positive self talk. She introduced having a conversation with a friend with Wolfgang and Henrietta, then transferred that into having a conversation with oneself. She helped the children use the talking bubbles to record how they could change the negative thoughts in their heads to positive thoughts, then she read the story Catching Thoughts by Bonnie Clark.
Our Valentine’s Day celebration offered some fun with the parachute, Valentine stories, a Valentine’s action game, Valentine card making, friendship bracelet making, heart shaped crayon making using old broken crayons, and Valentine writing work, including a maze, word search, color by number and color by sight word activities. Children took turns delivering their Valentine cards into everyone’s mailbags. We finished off our morning by enjoying all the tasty treats families brought, including strawberry frosting covered cupcakes, oatmeal raisin cookies, homemade animal crackers, heart shaped muffins, fruit, vegetables, pretzels, and veggies with dip.
The big snowstorm last week left a lot of snow that we used to build snow forts (which were all quickly demolished), snowmen, our sledding hill, snow trails, and snow pies, cakes, and soups.
Kindergarten students practiced their reading individually with books, and as a group with letters from Lyn. They chose a word or letter and circled it in the note each time it appeared. There were a LOT of a’s! They were each given six or seven words and tasked with finding the match, then reading through their words and using them to build a sentence, writing new words as needed to create what they wanted to say. On Valentine’s Day they did a dice addition sheet, rolling the die twice, coloring that number hearts, then recording their equation.
During Friday science we had fun with a citrus taste test. We tried a mandarin, clementine, orange, tangerine, lemon, lime, grapefruit, and Mineola. Some of the children opted out of tasting and some couldn’t wait to taste them all, and were excited to finish off the leftovers. They observed some similarities and differences in the shapes and colors and tastes. Most preferred the sweeter fruits, but some loved the lemon, lime, and grapefruit most.
The Friday afternoon group took a snowshoeing trip with Michelle and Makenna out to the field behind school and frolicked in the snow, taste testing the fresh layer and building snowmen.
