Week 2

In week 2, we explored many different nursery rhymes. We started by learning Jack Be Nimble.

The children had so much fun acting this out by jumping over the candlestick block. We traded Jack's name for their own as we recited it.

Then they illustrated the poem with themselves jumping over the candlestick.

Our poem of the week was Hey Diddle Diddle. We had fun taking this apart and putting it back together. At the end of the week, we added this poem to our poetry binder.

Our next nursery rhyme was Jack and Jill. We tore paper and glued it to the hill and illustrated part of the poem.

Humpty Dumpty was one of our favorites.

We cut out bricks and glued them to Humpty's Wall.

The best part was dancing to the Hip Hop Humpty song. They were so cute!

We reviewed the alphabet this week and will continue to do so before we begin individual letters. We read a book called Animals in the Park. This was an alphabet book where each animal on the page started with a letter and did an activity with the same letter.

A similar alphabet book was From Anne to Zach.

We worked on our phonemic awareness activities daily to help us rhyme, segment and isolate sounds in the words we hear. We also practiced reading to ourselves and shared reading with others.

Each day, we begin with writing in our journals. We read Aziz the Storyteller and we learned that writing is just telling on paper. We enjoyed sharing our writing with others at the carpet, just like Aziz.

We are still learning to follow directions and we read Listen and Learn to help distinguish between good and bad listening.

Blabber Mouse was a book about a bad listener, who learned to follow directions.

In math, we continued practicing our counting, attendance, calendar and working with math manipulatives. 

During science, we practiced safety. We watched a movie about the importance of washing our hands. We learned how germs are spread and how we can prevent them from spreading by washing with warm water and soap.

We sorted science tools and toys.

We practiced using a hand lens.

We used our hand lens to match small items to larger ones.

We practiced using an eye dropper by predicting and counting the number of drops of water that would fit on a penny.

On Friday, we practiced our safety techniques with a simple science experiment called Kool Aid Fizz. We mixed baking soda, Kool Aid and water. The students had so much fun predicting what was going to happen. Some even knew it was a chemical reaction. They also loved how the color changed. We recorded what we observed on paper. See our before and after pictures below.

We have been doing better with our rules and following directions. The children were able to earn some center time. We still have a long way to go with our clean-up procedure and our noise level, but they had fun exploring some of our centers.

One fun event that only kindergartners get to do is Hill Harbor. We will go out every Friday and explore this fun place. Just look at the exciting things we get to do each week!

We welcomed a new student, Zara, to our classroom this week.

By now you all know that we added an 8th kindergarten class. Three boys in my class were chosen to be in Ms. Moten's class. We had to say goodbye to our friends, Everett, Alistair and Nicholas. We are lucky that they are right next door and that we get to see them at recess too.

A huge thank you to Jenny Laudadio (Traver's mom) for putting together our classroom roster with pictures and e-mail and phone contacts. You should have found this in your child's folder or backpack today. We appreciate all of her work. It will be nice for when we want to call up a friend for a play date. It is also great for birthday invites too.