Kindergarten Blog 10/21

Dear Kindergarten Families,

We hope everyone who celebrates had a wonderful Simchat Torah this week. Kindergarteners had a special visitor, learned a new song “You Gotta Sing!” and learned a bit about neurons. We also started something new called Literacy Stations, where students rotate through three literacy activities in small groups.

In Hebrew, we added more colors to our vocabulary: grey אפור ah-for, and brown חום chum. We began reading the classic book מעשה בחמישה בלונים (A Tale of Five Balloons), which gives an exciting way to practice describing colors. We also continued to discuss different weather patterns, especially as temperatures dropped.

In Judaic Studies, we learned more about Bereshit בראשית, and explored dramatic interpretations of what תוהו ובוהו chaos could be like. We had an exciting visit from the author Shoshana Nambi who wrote: “The Very Best Sukkah: A Story from Uganda”, a book we read during our Sukkot week at school. The Kindergartners had amazing questions for Shoshana, and were able to gain insight into what it was like to grow up in a Jewish community in Uganda, as well as how authors draw on their own experiences in their writing.

In Science, Kindergarteners learned about neural plasticity, about how we learn and grow and our neural pathways continue to strengthen as we practice skills. Students modeled sending information down their neurons by wrapping pipe cleaners around the axons of the neurons, making them thicker and stronger. 

At one of our Literacy Stations we did some handwriting review and learned how to form a new letter: H. We made a list of words that start with H and sorted pictures into H and Not H groups according to their initial sounds.  At another station we did some Guided Reading activities, predicting what we thought a book might be about based on the cover and the pictures and then reading it to see if we were correct.  Taking advantage of the repetitive patterns in the books we used pictures and the first letter to figure out unknown words.  

In Math we worked on counting backwards from ten and figured out what numbers were missing when counting both forwards and backwards.  In Writer’s  Workshop we continued the very important Kindergarten work of stretching words out to spell them.  We got a new tool to use in our books, a class list in case we want to include our classmates in one of our books. 

We concluded our week with our weekly Kindergarten-First Grade sing and Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

K Team