Kindergarten Blog 3/25

Dear Kindergarten Families,

The biggest event of the last two weeks was definitely Purim, complete with buddy time, the Purim carnival, and special activities with the 1st graders. It was so fun to come into school in costume and celebrate with the whole school! Going back to masks this week has been a bit of an adjustment, but everyone is doing really well to keep each other safe.

In Science, we continued with our scientific categorizations. We spoke about how sometimes it’s hard to figure out the best way to group different kinds of things! We looked at all of our recess equipment, and found many ways to categorize the items together, and then went out into the yard to execute a plan the Kindergarteners came up with to best organize the materials. We spoke about shape, size, and color, but ultimately decided to group items based on what they’re used for– and the recess bin has never been more orderly.

In Music class, Kindergarteners now know the whole Do Re Mi song! Plus, this week they began their unit on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, learning about the story and the instruments that represent different characters.

In Judaics, we learned all about the Purim story leading up to holiday last week, and this week we are continuing with our Shabbat curriculum by learning the meanings to our favorite Shabbat songs, starting with how “Shalom Aleichem” is about welcoming others to dinner and the importance of invitation. We also are learning new Shabbat songs as well.

In Hebrew, we read the book Kaspion. We learned “gadol” “benoni” and “katan” (big, medium, and small). We also entered into our animals unit, and the children are learning how to say what their favorite animals are and learning each others’. Language for this week included “ani ohev/et ____” (“I love ___”). The children also now know how to count to 30.

In Math we started a new unit in measurement.  We compared items with the math words, length, longer, shorter, height and taller.  Chilcern went around the classroom measuring items with sticks of ten snap cubes and ten paper clips. We talked about the importance of starting at the beginning of the item to get an accurate measurement.  At the end of the period one group discovered that the length of the wall from the shelves to the door is 170 snap cubes!

In Reading we talked about Persistence Power, or really sticking with a tricky word and trying to sound it out and use clues from the pictures.  We even sounded out some very challenging nonsense words like fubzopgozer!  We used our Snap Word Power in a hunt around the hallway for snap words that were mysteriously hanging on the walls and cubbies. 

In Writing we continue to talk about ways to make our writing easier for ourselves and others to read.  This week we talked about adding periods at the end of our sentences.  When we read the morning message we have special hand motions for periods, commas, question marks, and exclamation points.

In Social Studies we continued our family study. We read a lovely story about adoption called Waiting for May.  We also continued to work on creating families different from our own, adding hair and a home. 

As always, our week concluded with Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Dawn, and Anat