Missing Monday made this week feel extra short!
Halloween is on the way, so we have been singing some Halloween themed songs and chants. We are enjoying “5 Little Pumpkins,” “Stirring our Brew,” and “The Ghost of John” (who is a silly, cold skeleton with no skin on).
Rain kept us in most of the day Tuesday and Friday, though we did get out for a mid day energy release. We are finding that we love our indoor days, but miss the opportunity to run and move whenever we want.
We began exploring where we live by introducing the universe and our place in it with the story Oliver Jeffers wrote for his child, Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth. We also used the universe nesting boxes to visit the Milky Way Galaxy, our solar system, planet earth, North America, The United States, New Hampshire, Lancaster, Sunnybrook, the child, and the atom, the energy inside each of us. We introduced land, air, and water and what makes up our environment. We used the sandpaper globe to identify land and water on our earth and the land, air, water mat to place animals according to where they travel/live/spend their time.
During sign language with Rose we finished learning the alphabet. We learned u-z, then practiced while identifying whose names start with which letters. We then sang and signed the ABC song and a second alphabet song Rose knows.
We read the story The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes about a girl named Beatrice who always did everything perfectly, and was hesitant to do anything that might result in a mistake. One day she is performing a juggling act in the talent show and makes a big mistake. She wonders, should she cry? Should she run off stage? But Beatrice started to laugh, then the audience laughed, and from then on she had fun making mistakes with everyone else. We talked about how we ALL make mistakes every day and that making mistakes is okay. We learn from our mistakes, and we can just brush them off and try again. We also discussed how Beatrice must have made mistakes, because to get so good at something like juggling, one would have to practice, and practice, and practice, which involves making lots of mistakes.
Thursday was our first Spanish class with Zeanny. We were introduced to counting, colors, body parts, frio (cold), calido (warm), arriba (up), and abajo (down) through songs, chants, and movement. Zeanny also read a story about Rubia and the Three Osos, which introduced the spanish words for house (casa), soup (sopa), plate (plato), bear (oso), and chair (silla).
Kindergarteners continued to work with cuisinaire rods to build 10. They counted up and built the days up to 23. They created the letter Gg out of grapevines, and Hh out of things in our habitat, such as grass, sticks, rocks, and moss.
During Friday science we continued with the theme of land, air, water and read about solids, liquids, and gasses. We compared three balloons – one with liquid water, one with solid water, and one with air. We read about how matter can exist in different forms, such as water as a liquid, solid ice, and water vapor. We poured some water from one container to another and observed how it changed shape. Then we pretended to be molecules in gas form, moving around really far apart, then in liquid form, closer together, then in solid form, packed in tight.
