The temperatures this week were toasty! We spent the majority of our days outside dancing under the hose, filling buckets of water for the mud kitchen, building a teepee tent, riding bikes, having pool noodle battles, digging up plants, repotting them, and selling them in the Plant Shop, building a fortress, going to school to work on computers, and cooking up a variety of soups.

Rose warmed us up with the Fire Truck song, then we signed the alphabet double handed two times. We practiced our insect signs, including caterpillar, butterfly, bug, mosquito, and worm. Rose then read and signed The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Rose asked for volunteers to be butterflies, and we finished up by singing, signing, and acting out the Five Little Butterflies song.

Preparing for our end of year presentation on Bees, courtesy of the Bee Patrol, has been a full time job this week. The songs “The Bee Patrol Anthem,” “Head, Thorax, Abdomen, Legs,” “The Bees Go Buzzing,” and “Have You Ever Gone a Dancing in a Busy Beehive,” were all introduced and practiced over and over. Hopefully we will have them down in four weeks! The students have been researching to answer their questions about bees and working with Lyn to record what they will present. They have continued working on their visuals for their presentation as well. It has been a busy, buzzy week!

The children made bee badges, which we cut out and laminated for them to wear as members of the Bee Patrol. They also drew Bee pictures to share for the end of year art show.

We continued sharing observations about friends who were SAFE, KIND, RESPECTFUL, and RESPONSIBLE and adding to our chain. We read Even Superheroes Make Mistakes and talked about how important it is to take responsibility and own up to our errors and that they are opportunities to learn. We shared some big mistakes that people have made, such as when builders who were constructing a new building for Dartmouth college in Hanover and dug the cellar 10 feet too far in the wrong direction, but how they worked as a team to problem solve and determine how to move forward.

Kindergarten students have been working on recognizing numbers 0-100, solving addition and subtraction word problems, and determining whether it is an addition or subtraction problem, doing some writing, practicing reading, and working diligently on their bee projects.

During Friday science we read about and discussed the second of the five senses, hearing. We read The Magic School Bus In the Haunted House and discussed how sound travels through the air through vibrations. We learned that the higher the sound, the closer the sound waves are together, and the lower the sound, the further apart they are. We examined the model of the ear then took out the big drum and piled all the felt balls on top. The children took turns in small groups making quiet sounds and gradually getting louder and louder until all the balls were vibrated off.