K Blog 5/13

Dear Kindergarten Families,

The last two weeks have been very exciting in Kindergarten. Last week, we had a school-wide Yom HaAtsma’ut celebration, and this week we got to paint Kiddush cups at the Painted Pot. We’ve been preparing for our Kabbalat Shabbat performance, which is a week from today! We have also been raising caterpillars and documenting their progress throughout the week and a half that we’ve had them.

In Science, we learned all about the life stages of butterflies, and learned about metamorphosis. Our classroom caterpillars grow a little bit every day and the children have noticed that many have begun spinning their chrysalis webs using their spinsters.

In Hebrew, we are reading Hazachah HaRa’ev (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), which the children are especially excited about given our new classroom pets. The book has great vocabulary like the days of the week, many food items, some descriptors like “ra’ev” (hungry).

In Judaics, we talked all about Yom HaAtsamua’ut last week, and this week we are learning about Lag B’Omer (33rd day of Omer) and the story of the holiday. We are continuing to practice for our Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony next Friday!

In Music class, Kindergarteners have completed their unit on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, where they learned about the story and the instruments of the orchestra that represent different characters. This week, they sang and danced to Eretz Zavat Chalav in honor of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

In Social Studies we continued our work on mapping by making a map of the classroom.  Each group focused on two walls of the room, noting the furniture on the floor and the items hanging on the walls.  Children then cut pieces of construction paper to represent what they saw.  Items were glued onto a large piece of butcher block paper, paying close attention as to where the items were placed.  Next we began a map of Smith Street.  We went out in front of the building to gather the data that we will need for the map.  In small groups children sketched a portion of the buildings on the street, paying close attention to the number of stories each building had and any signs that indicated what kind of building it was. 

In Writing children are publishing their second narrative stories.  The final step is going through a more extensive editing checklist than the one used earlier in the year.  It includes checking for spaces between words, including details about how the characters felt, adding more details about what happened, and the beginning use of lower case letters. 

In Reading we were lucky enough to receive many new books for Reading Workshop.  Children are now “Book Shopping,” (something that will continue in First Grade), choosing ten books at an appropriate level and of interest to them.  They read the books independently while teachers meet independently with children to help them with their books.

In Math we continue to work on coins and subtraction. Some played a game called Collecting Quarters which involves rolling a dice and collecting pennies and then trading in five pennies for nickel, two nickels for a dime, and two dimes and a nickel for a quarter.  This is tricky work for Kindergartners!

As always, our week concluded with Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Dawn, and Anat