Kindergarten Blog 3/4

Dear Kindergarten Families,

We had some unexpected Kindergarten fun this week.  Moving from 2D shapes to 3D shapes we were looking at cones and many children were introduced for the first time to a funnel! This led to some water play to experiment with how the funnel worked and ended up with a Kindergartner doing a water show for his classmates and many plastic animals!  We also experimented with 3D shapes (cubes, cylinders, spheres, and cones) to see which ones could slide, roll and stack on top of one another!

But it was not all fun and games of course!  In Writer’s Workshop we returned to narrative writing, with students writing about experiences they had during the February Break. It was exciting to see how many details they included in their pictures as well as more and more letters in their words. We will be focusing on how to make our writing easier for others to read by including spaces between words,  more and more sounds and snap words, and beginning punctuation. 

We also tried something new this week in having a work period in which everyone did some handwriting, some phonics work, and some reading, working independently on skills they are working on while small groups met with the teacher.  This was a big step for Kindergartners as they kept track of what they needed to do next by following a coded  list on the board. We will continue to work on this over the next several weeks. 

This week in Science, we went out into the side yard and found some things to test our living-nonliving lists on.

In Music class, Kindergarteners have continued to learn about the instruments of the orchestra. So far, they have learned about the instruments of the string section and the woodwind section. You might ask your child which ones they remember (we mime playing the instruments, too). They are also continuing to learn solfège through the song Do Re Mi, from the Sound of Music.

In Hebrew/Judaics, we are learning all about Purim, integrating Hebrew vocabulary into the stories. We learned “oznei haman”, “masecha”, and others. We began diving into the story of Purim, and we will continue to learn more about each character as we get closer to Purim.

Additionally, we started a unit on Shabbat to make Shabbat booklets.

We ended an already exciting week with Pajama Day, complete with buddy time, the Pajama Day parade, and a special Quiet Choice on a Friday!

Shabbat Shalom,

Dawn, Anat, and Atalya