Kindergarten Blog 1/6/23

Dear Kindergarten Families,

We hope you all enjoyed the holiday break and Happy New Year! This week, Kindergarteners have been settling back into our routines, and we welcomed Asher to our class.

In Social Studies we began our study of Martin Luther King.  We talked about the unfair laws that existed during King’s time and the work he did to change the laws. We talked about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the fact that King believed in nonviolent protest.  Children expressed surprise at the laws of segregation and agreed that it was good that Rosa Parks broke the law. We will be learning the song The Dream of Martin Luther King to sing at a Tekes next Friday.  

In writing we talked about the importance of adding details to our stories.  We read a funny book called One Day, The End (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glws-Zf-DwA) in which each story has a beginning and ending but no details in the middle. We will continue to focus on adding details when we think a story is done as well as adding more and more letters to our work. 

In Math we continued our study of measurement, focusing on length.  We compared the length of  different objects using the terms shorter than, longer than, and the same length as.  We also measured items using nonstandard units such as popsicle sticks, paper clips, and Unifix cubes.  Children did some prediction of how long they thought different items would be. 

In Phonics we did a careful study of the alphabet chart, noticing that each box has an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, and a picture that starts with that sound. We talked about the chart being a very useful tool for both reading and writing.  We went book shopping to find new books for our book baggies and chose a few books that we really wanted to learn to read. 

In Science, we began our new Forces In Motion unit. We talked about push and pull and how they are similar and different, and we learned about gravity, which is a force that pulls us down to Earth. Kindergartners experimented with ramps of varying heights/slopes to see how fast and how far toy cars traveled, finding that cars traveled faster and further on steeper ramps.

In Hebrew, we began learning about Hebrew words that we use in the winter: choref חורף. We learned to say hat kova כובע, scarf tzaif צעיף, gloves kfafot כפפות, and boots magafayim מגפיים. We are in the process of making multi-material snowmen who wear all of this winter gear. We also learned about winter weather words like cold kar קר, chilly karir קריר, שמג snow sheleg שלג . We are reading the book המטריה הגדולה של אבא Dad’s Big Umbrella as part of our winter theme.

In Judaic Studies, we learned about the fifth day of creation, when g-d created aquatic animals. We learned how to say a few marine animals in Hebrew too, like octopus tamnoon תמנון, shark karish כריש, and fish dag דג , It turns out this Kindergarten class has a lot of shark aficionados! 

As always, we ended our week with a lovely K-1 Sing and Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

K Team