Kindergarten Blog 4/29

Dear Kindergarten Families,

This week in our Morning Meetings, we began learning two new songs: All God’s Critters and Mama Don’t Allow. We also started constructing a new block building during Choice Time and started talking about Israeli Independence Day, which is next week.

In Science, we returned to our Forces In Motion unit for a bit of a fun review. Children experimented with balance scales and cars going down ramps to see what weighed the same and how the cars’ speed changes when we add animal toy passengers, recording our findings as we experimented.

In Hebrew/Judaics, we are starting to talk about Yom HaAtsma’ut (Israeli Independence Day). We have been looking at maps of Israel, which the children are beginning to be experts at making in their map unit in Social Studies. We looked at the Israeli flag and seal, talking about the symbolism of all the details. We also broke down what it means to be “atsma’i” (independent), and in what ways we’re all independent in our own lives and the significance it holds.

We are also preparing for our Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony! Children are learning lines for the presentation and motions to new and old songs. It is a lot of preparation but the children are very excited to be Shabbat experts and share their knowledge with all of you.

In Writing children were excited to start new stories about something they did over the break. We reviewed how to write a true story which includes thinking about something that happened to you, telling the story to another person, and then writing it using words and pictures to tell who was there, where it happened, and what happened.  We introduced three new snap words: he, will, and want.  We continued working with the sounds that the vowels make. 

In Math we did some more work with coins and began some work with subtraction.  We told subtraction stories, telling how many we started with, how many ran away, were eaten, or got stolen, and how many were left.

In Social Studies we continued our mapping unit.  One group made individual maps of the lobby and the other made individual maps of the yard.  We faced each wall of both spaces and looked at what we needed to include on the map and how much space we had to use.  Each group then began working on a larger map of the classroom.

As always, our week concluded with Kabbalat Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Dawn, and Anat