Kindergarten Blog 4/4

Dear Kindergarten Families,

It was so nice that our final day before break was so warm! We are definitely excited for Spring. The class had a lot of Spring cleaning work in preparation for Passover.

In Writers Workshop, Kindergartners read “Roller Coaster”, which is an exciting story about a roller coaster! We examined details in the people’s facial expressions and noticed how some pages had sound effects. Children are continuing to work on writing complete sentences with spaces between words and punctuation, and that our stories have beginning, middle and ends.

In Word Work Kindergartners learned two new snap words: play and am. Kindergartners also learned how to write lowercase “r” and “n”. Children continue to work on short vowel sounds as well as phonemic awareness activities. 

In Social Studies, students are continuing to work on their Model Magic families, focusing on making families that are different from their own.

In Math, Kindergartners have been working with pennies, nickels, and dimes. Using the many coins brought in for the Penny Drive we studied the front and back of each coin and talked about their values.  We talked about the many different ways you could pay for something that cost 10 cents and some students did some coin riddles. For example, how could you make 12 cents with three coins?

In Science we did a flower dissection!  Each child had a daffodil and took it apart to find the petals, Corona, stamen, pistol, seeds, and stem.  Some were very excited to find small amounts of pollen on their fingers as they pulled off the stamen. (And during one recess, the students excitedly pointed out the parts of the garden flowers they recognized!)

In Hebrew and Judaic studies, we finished learning about the signs of Passover. The students learned the meaning of the foods that are on the Seder plate and what they each represent. They learned the song “Mah Nishtana,” which is about the four questions and how this night is different from all other nights.

Last week we were visited by Moshe himself (Rabbi Menashe Wolf), who traveled forward in time thousands of years to teach students how to make matzah! The children started by picking the individual wheat berries from stalks of wheat, and then ground those up to make their own flour. The children impressed Moshe with their knowledge of his life story, and they got to eat the matzah that they made completely from scratch.

On Monday we had a desert-style Seder with our fourth grade buddies! The students were so excited for the Seder. They sang songs and ate all the foods that are on the Seder plate. They found the afikoman after searching through their classroom. Everyone got to enjoy matzah with chocolate spread as a tasty Pesach treat. The students learned the words: charoset, maror, avadim, avdut, cherut, bnei chorin, afikoman, haggadah and matzah. 

In Music class, Kindergarteners have started a new unit on the instruments of the orchestra. To begin, they have learned about the Strings: violin, viola, cello and bass, also harp and piano. They noticed that the guitar, the banjo and the ukulele are also stringed instruments, but we don’t usually find them playing in orchestras. They have also learned about the Woodwinds: contrabassoon, bassoon, bass clarinet, clarinet, oboe, flute and piccolo. Be sure to ask them what they know, they like to share!

Chag Same’ach,

K Team