Kindergarten Sing

You may have heard your child singing our latest "Kindergarten Sing" song, Thanks Alot by Raffi. Here is a short video of the day all 5 kindergarten classes got together to sing our songs. Enjoy!

Personalize a digital slideshow

Giving Thanks

After a week long study of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, we had a fun baking day today and came together as a class to share our treats. We worked in two groups to make pumpkin muffins and butter with each child taking turns adding ingredients for the muffins and shaking a jar of cream until it turned to butter. To make the process more fun, we recited a traditional chant: Come butter come. Come butter come. Arianna's at the garden gate, waiting for a butter cake. Come butter come. After many rounds of the poem, we were rewarded with butter and spread it on crackers to taste. We also used our butter on the muffins we made. You will find a copy of the recipe in your child's folder. Happy Thanksgiving!

Glimmer Lantern Glimmer

To celebrate the changing season and winter darkness, we made special lanterns and sang several lantern songs. I hope you can find a special place in your home for your child's lantern.

Here is a lantern song I shared with the children: Glimmer, lantern, glimmer Little stars a-shimmer Over meadow, moor and dale Flitter, flutter, elfin veil Pee-wit, pee-wit, tikka-tikka-tik Rucoo, rucoo.

Recipe for a Forest

As an extension to last weeks ECO lesson when students learned about the things that make up a forest, we wrote our own "Recipe for a Forest". We brainstormed what you might find in the forest, then I collected the items for students to record. In addition to learning about forests, students were working on listening to all the sounds in words and recording what we hear.

ECO and Thanksgiving Lunch

We had a busy, fun day Wednesday with our ECO morning and Thanksgiving lunch. We joined Mrs. Koch's class for lessons around forests and the kinds of things you might find in a forest. We arrived at Harrison field and enjoyed a quick tag game in which first the dad's then the mom's and teachers were "it". Many laughs were heard as the adults chased the children and turned them into "trees" when they were tagged. We then had our snack and entered the forest where we played a version of hide and seek. I pretended to be an eagle and counted to 25 while all of the children ran to find a good hiding place within eyesight of the eagle. The children were encouraged to camouflage themselves so that the eagle couldn't find the "prey" hiding in the woods. When I opened my eyes, I had to stay in my "nest" and use my eagle eyes to spot the prey. After the first round, many children quickly caught on to what would make a good hiding place and found good ways to blend into the woods. After our game, Susan and I had fun engaging the kids in a story about making a forest out of things such as flour, cereal, bananas, and tomatoes. We called it our "recipe for a forest". The children had a good laugh as we pretended to cook up the forest in a big pot. In the end, the kids were asked what things would really make up a forest and sent them on a scavenger hunt to find them. Tomorrow, we will extend our lesson into the classroom and do an activity around writing a true "recipe for a forest". I was thrilled to see so many families gather with us in our classroom to share a meal together and talk during the Thanksgiving lunch. Thank you for all who joined us!

KinderArt

We began our KinderArt program last week with a look at Paul Cezanne's piece, Apples and Oranges. We began by looking very closely at what we noticed in the painting, then learned a little about the artist himself. We also began making our artwork modeled after Apples and Oranges by making orange and red "community paper"; a process where children paint entire sheets of paper to then use to cut out shapes. We used this paper to cut circles for our apples and oranges. We are currently working on tracing and cutting shapes of bowls and pitchers and will use these to create a final picture. Ask your child to tell you more!

The painting is recreated in the classroom for children to look more closely at.

Pumpkin Day!

For the last two weeks we have been learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin, and doing all things pumpkin related. Reading books about pumpkins, singing songs, and creating pumpkin art. For Pumpkin Day the kindergartners used pumpkins for a series of activities that included, weighing and measuring, drawing, balancing, testing if a pumpkin will sink or float, counting, and even pumpkin bowling. We had a blast!