Friday, January 31

Hello! We finally had a 5 day week, and we accomplished so much!

These four friends were the first to finish our big insect puzzle.

We are almost finished with our quick spin through all the capital letters. Each day, we learn the handwriting strokes for two capitals and review the strokes for the lowercase letters. At the same time, we are spending time each day blending sounds to make words! Now that all the testing is complete and the teachers have met to talk about how best to meet each child's needs, next week we will restart targeted small reading groups. The snow was fun, but we are really glad to have some uninterrupted time (hopefully) to get to the important stuff. February, March, and April are a time of spectacular growth in kindergarten!

Speaking of snow, we were curious about the animal tracks in our LEAP area this week and so we launched and investigation of the prints as our STEAM fair project. Here are the first tracks we noticed.... aren't they interesting?

We took studying photos of four different prints.

Then, we compared real Pennsylvanian animal prints with the ones in the photo. Even though we disagreed on the identity of some of the prints, we learned that scientists have to be careful, thoughtful observers who always have their eyes open to the world around them.

We even came up with a list of other clues animals leave behind. Some of their ideas were pretty clever, don't you think?

Mrs. Albright conducted a series of interactive lessons around the topic of motion this week. She even brought in balls for everyone so that we could explore how motion begins (through a push force or a pull force) and how objects can change directions.

And after that, she taught them about friction with ramps of varying surfaces. Ask your child which one was the smoothest (wax paper) and which had the most friction (the rocky one).

Here is our class's finished STEAM Fair presentation:

And here are photos of friends in our class who made projects at home! We learned a lot from listening to them share their creations and learning.

Today we practiced retelling stories to our stuffies. We made retelling bracelets to help us remember to include the characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end when retelling a story.

Have a great weekend!