K Blog 12/17

Dear Kindergarten Families,

This week, we learned a new song, This Little Light of Mine, started a brand-new unit in Science, and (perhaps the most exciting activity this week) labeled the classroom!  

In Phonics there was great excitement as we worked to label all the various parts of the classroom.  With a partner students listened for the beginning, middle and ending sounds of things like the pencils, erasers, dinosaurs, shelves, tape, desks, and much much more.  They then recorded the letters on an index card and taped the cards around the room. 

In Social Studies we had discussions about how Kindergartners can be responsible members of their classes and their families. Students then drew pictures of the various ways they can be helpful in school and at home. 

In Math we continue to work on careful counting of items and recognizing and forming  the numbers through twenty. Some children played a new version of Racing Dice, using three dice and trying to add two of them together just by looking at them and then counting on the third die. We also told addition and subtraction stories using cubes and beads. 

We began a whole new unit in Science this week: Forces In Motion! Children talked about the way things move, and what factors influence the way things move. Is it easier to push a heavy object or a light object? If you push a really heavy object, does it move, or do you move? We reviewed the scientific method, and then conducted a series of experiments: the first was to see whether a scooter on its own or a scooter with a box of blocks on it travels further down the hallway. We talked about gravity, momentum, and friction. Next, we built ramps with three different levels of steepness, and experimented with which steepness made a toy car go further. We learned that the cars built up more momentum when the ramp was steeper. Next, we tested out whether a heavy car or light car traveled further on the same ramp, and all the children were surprised to learn that the heavy one went further, despite the lighter scooter traveling further in our first test. Our conclusions for all our tests led to more questions for further experiments to be done in the future!

In Hebrew, we practiced our new vocabulary from last week: seder yom/seder sheli (schedule of the day/my schedule), lehitorer (wake up), lishtof panim (wash face), lirchotz (wash), eich at(a) mit’orer(et) baboker? (How do you wake up in the morning?), sha’on (clock). We are also practicing our family words by describing who is in our families, and what each family member’s name is. We read a book about all different types of families and all the ways families might look like (some families have one dad and one mom, some people live with their grandparents, some people have two dads, etc). We have just started to talk about what we like to do with our families, using the phrase “Ani ohev/et l’___ im hamishpacha sheli” (I like to ___ with my family). We are returning to our weather words, so students can accurately describe the weather outside.

In Judaic Studies, the children are continuing to practice vocabulary for the Fourth day: shemesh (sun), yareach (moon), and kochavim (stars), and we’ve introduced the Fifth day. The vocab for this day includes the children learning the words for their animals– ones that live in the water or fly in the sky– in Hebrew!

We concluded our week with Kabbalat Shabbat.

Wishing you a happy and healthy Winter Break and New Year. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Anat, and Dawn