Our Kindergarten students are looking to the future and are busy talking about first grade.  What will it be like? Will I find my way around?  Will I make new friends? These are just a few of the conversations we have had over the past week.  The children will officially move up to first grade in our moving up ceremony on Thursday.  They will tour all of the first grade classrooms and spend some time in each room.  The children will then return to their Kindergarten classrooms for a fun filled final day.  We are so proud of our students and have enjoyed watching them grow throughout the year.  We will truly miss them.  Please encourage reading and writing over the summer.  Take a journal along on vacation or write us letters! We would love to hear from you.  The K team wishes you all a restful and wonderful summer!  

As our school year winds down, Kindergarten students took some time to reflect on their year by writing a final writing piece, a memory book about their Kindergarten experience.  What a fun and productive time it has been!  The children summarized what they liked the best and what they will miss the most, and then they included what they would like to be when they grow up. They also threw in some fun facts about themselves at the end of their books.  Our hope is that the lessons the children learned and the memories they made this year will remain with them always.  We have enjoyed every minute of watching them blossom.  Moving up day is right around the corner!

This week during Math Workshop our students learned about time.  We introduced them to the digital and analog clocks during a large group meeting, and then we explored the digital clocks and timers on the iPads.  Many children were curious to see what time it was in different countries where some of their family members live, so we took a time hop around the world. The children had fun working on an iPad to time a partner doing a physical activity for a minute; some of the activities included jumping jacks, squats, claps, and push ups.  After we were thoroughly worn out, we shared our results, and later we experimented with the Telling Time application on the iPad.  The children learned how and where to place numbers on a clock.  During choice time next week some children will make their own clocks.

As our Kindergarten year winds down, it is time for many celebrations. The children celebrated their final writing unit of the year when they shared their non-fiction books with family and friends this week. They not only researched and wrote their own material about an animal of their choice, but they also created a fun summary of the characteristics of their animal on the iPads during library class.  We are so proud of all of our young authors. This research unit is the beginning foundation for all of the research that they will accomplish in the future during their academic careers.  We are really enjoying our final days together in Kindergarten before our students take their next big step to first grade!!

"Show me the money!" The theme this week in kindergarten was all about money as we revisited our discussions about the penny, nickel, dime and quarter during our math workshop. The children worked together and turned their dramatic play area into a supermarket using their cash registers and play money. They took turns sorting coins and learned what it means to exchange money for goods and how much each coin represents. We then played the coin game to reinforce their knowledge and understanding of the value of the coins; children roll the money dice and draw coins, and then have fun adding up the sums of their money. Next week we plan to participate in more fun money-themed activities.

Over the past few weeks, kindergarten students have been diligently working during library class to research many different types of animals. The children have become experts on an animal of their choice and are ready to share their knowledge in their final kindergarten writing piece; they will publish their non-fiction books and share them with you at the final writing celebration. This week, the children learned what it means to transfer data.  They reviewed their notes from the library and decided what important information should be incorporated in their books. Afterwards, they completed the first page of their research book which was all about their animal's habitat.  We learned a lot of new information from the children, and it was fun for them to share their expertise. They are motivated and eager as they begin their work, and it has definitely ignited their interest to read more non-fiction books.  Who knows what they will become an expert on next! 

As discussions about Earth Day continued this week, Kindergarten students traveled to Englewood to Flat Rock Brook Nature Center to observe nature firsthand and to learn more about the environment we live in. Four very knowledgeable guides took our group on a walking tour of the grounds.  We saw many signs of Spring on our walk, including beautiful birds and animals and some interesting plants.  At the end of our tour, we were all very fortunate and excited to see a great horned owl and some eagles living at the nature center.  We all had a great time hiking with friends and learning more about the wonders of nature!

Kindergarten students were busy during math workshop this week learning to count by 10’s, 5’s, and 2’s!  The children had fun experimenting with the different ways to count numbers and learning more about place value.  They completed many morning activities focusing on solving number mysteries. For example, they had to find the missing numbers in a sequence of written numbers by counting by 5’s, use a key to navigate their way through a hundreds chart and color in the correct numbers according to the key.  We played many counting games during morning meeting each day to reinforce this topic.  The children learned a lot and had a great time counting all week!

Spring is in the air! The warm weather inspired us to spend some much needed time outside of the classroom this week.  The children took note of the changing of the seasons and the flowers and plants that were blooming all around them.  As we continue to talk about Earth Day and how we can take care of our Earth, we thought it would be fun to have the children interact with the environment around them by going on a nature walk; they enjoyed a scavenger hunt searching for certain items as they walked around the community grounds.   Later, when they returned to the classroom, the children felt inspired to graph their results, and since we have been learning about tally marks, they then tallied up the items that they found on their hunt.

Kindergarten students had a lot of fun learning about what it means to recycle this week.  With Earth Day upon us we decided to dive into a new unit in our classrooms to learn about we can care for our Earth. The children sorted different materials to check for the recycle symbol and discovered that there are some things they can recycle that they had never thought of before.  Each student decorated their own recycle symbol to hang in their home, and many of them were excited to tell their family members what they had learned.  We read the book Michael Recycle  in which Michael, the recycling superhero, goes on many recycling adventures; the students came up with their own superhero recycling stories and shared them with the class.  We are looking forward to many more activities next week!