Sunshine Room (Kindergarten/Pre-K)
Latest news from the classroom…
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January Newsletter
What’s been happening?
We began 2010 with lots of exciting new learning experiences.
The kindergartners now have their own journals to write in, while the Spotted Kittens group now has its own time for writers’ workshop, just before rest time.
The children are preparing a party to celebrate 100 days of kindergarten/pre-k. Part of the 100-day tradition is to ask the children to bring 100 objects to school in a see-through bag.
This month, we learned about the life and contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr. to our society. The children learned that, in his time, there were unfair rules (laws) and that he helped to change them by talking rather than fighting.
The sad news of the earthquake in Haiti was an opportunity to expand the children’s awareness of reality. They learned what an earthquake is, and the disasters it can provoke. When this information is given to the children at their level, it awakens compassion and helps them value what they have. David, a relief volunteer, came to the class to speak to the children about his experience in Haiti. To assist the children in understanding the sensation of an earthquake, he compared it to the experience of standing on a bus or in a subway and losing one’s balance when the vehicle lurches or moves suddenly. To depict the aftermath of the earthquake, he shared with the children his personal pictures from his visit prior to the earthquake, then additional photos from his visit following it. He also provided a video he filmed while riding in a helicopter (in order to deliver supplies to the victims), documenting its landing. His stories helped the children understand what efforts are being made to help the victims, as well as to see and hear about a place very unlike their own world. Thank you very much, David, for sharing with us!
At the beginning of February Paulina Kaminska, a teacher from Heliantus—our our pen pals’ school in Poland—will be coming to spend a week with us.
Language Arts
Kindergarten:
In the beginning of the New Year, the kindergarteners spent some time reviewing the vowel sounds. They have also been working on creating three letter words with a,e,i,o or u in the middle, though these little linguists were determined to write words much longer.
They learned about sequencing and how important it is to put a story in order so that it makes sense. They were able to play around with sequence cards to get a sense of this, before moving on to writing stories of their own. Each group was able to use invented spelling to create stories cooperatively. These stories are hanging up on the bulletin board next to the lunch tables. The children were very creative and extended the stories beyond what was in the picture. They did phenomenally and I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
During shared reading time, the children read and sang the songbooks Save a Tree For Me and Rain Forest, connecting science, literature and music.
Pre-k:
The Spotted Kittens have continued thinking of words with consonant sounds, a task which is becoming easier for them. The lists of words that they come up with for each sound are getting longer and more complex.
The Pre-k children have also been working with sequence cards, putting pictures of a story in order. The children absolutely love this and enjoy telling their stories to the rest of their classmates.
Writing
All of the Sunshine Roomers began learning to write lowercase letters this month. They began by learning the concept that lowercase letters are lower than uppercase letters. To further demonstrate this concept, the children made one hand into a fist (lowercase) and one hand flat (uppercase) in order to see the difference in size. This activity was done as a reminder prior to learning each new letter.
The children also learned that some lowercase letters look just like uppercase letters (c, o, s, v and w), except for the fact that they are “lower”. To assist the children with directionality with the letter g, we called g “George” and made a net (the curve under g) to catch him. The children really enjoyed this story!
The kindergartners continued reviewing their capital letters (as well as words) in their handwriting workbooks. They were also able to practice their newly-learned lowercase letters during writer’s workshop. They have had much success!
The Pre-ks had the assistance of the “Magic C Bunny” (a puppet) to help them remember how to start several of their lowercase letters. The “Magic C Bunny” made the lessons lively and memorable for the youngest Sunshine Roomers!
Science
This month we began a study on trees. We braved the cold and went outside to compare and contrast the trees in our play yard. The children estimated, then measured, tree trunks by using their hands and arms. They concluded the lesson by making bark rubbings of the largest of all the trees at school, the Norway maple.
We then moved on to the topic of damage and destruction to trees. Ms. Randi guided the children using illustrations of trees that were harmed by humans (by pulling off leaves, twigs and branches) and trees that were left alone. The children unanimously agreed that the trees that grew normally looked healthy and had lots of leaves and branches.
The kindergartners discussed trees as a habitat and compared and contrasted a human’s habitat to a tree. What lives in trees? Where do they find food and water? Shelter? Space? The Pre-ks listened to the story Gray Squirrel at Pacific Avenue by Geri Harrington to learn which animals live in trees and how they find the tools for survival.
Learning about trees then developed into learning about the rain forest. All of the children learned about the layers of the rain forest, identified animals that live in each layer, and listened to readings about what happens to the animals if the trees get cut down. Not only was it a science lesson, it was also a lesson in compassion.
Finally, the children played a guessing game where they asked questions to determine the animal Ms. Randi was thinking of. What layer does it live in? What color is its body? Does it walk or fly? What does it eat? They also used their bodies to create the sounds of the rain forest: rain, wind, birds and insects.
Math
This month we reviewed counting forward and backward. Then we focused on geometry. We learned the names and characteristics of solid figures, such as cube, cylinder, cone, etc. We learned to identify the outlines of solid figures and how to distinguish between 2-D and 3-D shapes. We then learned about symmetry and its characteristics, and concluded by coloring in templates of mandalas.
Next we began learning fractions, dividing objects into two, three, four and more equal parts. Reading the book Eating Fractions and playing with the pizza and cake toys were a fun ways to learn about fractions. The next subject will be the learning of numbers 10 to 30.
Drama
As an extension of learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., we dramatized being fair with our friends and speaking up when someone is unfair. To learn the abstract concept of tolerance, we read the book I Am Tolerant and dramatized how we behave in an inclusive way with all our classmates. Dramatizing scenarios such as two children who want to play different games deciding to take turns to play both, helps the children learn the concept in the context of their everyday experiences. This also gives the children ways to deal with differences and develop character.
Art
This month in art class, the Sunshine Roomers learned all about trees in wintertime. First, the students created an evergreen tree quilt. Together we all learned about evergreen trees, and what makes them different from other trees. We also learned about the different parts of an evergreen tree, including the needles, branches and trunk. The students created their evergreen tree by using a collage technique. Using a variety of green paper, students created a one-of-a-kind tree. They also played around with patterns when designing their “quilt” piece. Using corks and tempera paint, they made “printed” patterns around their evergreen trees.
The Sunshine Roomers also learned about icicles (how they are formed) and made icicle winter trees using a variety of materials including collage paper, oil pastels, scissors and brown bags. Students learned about icicles and how they form on trees. The Spotted Kittens made their trees by tracing their hands on brown paper and cutting them out. The Bald Eagles created their trees by using brown collage paper and Elmer’s glue. The Rainbow Butterflies used oil pastels to create their winter trees. The Sunshine Roomers also made Glue Resist Watercolor Paintings. Using Elmer’s glue, students created an original design on white painting paper. After the glue design dried, they went over their image with a variety of colored watercolor paints. They learned that the glue “resisted” the watercolor paint. How amazed we all were that our glue design actually “popped out” from underneath the watercolor paint.
When the students began learning about 3-dimensional shapes in math class, Miss Erica decided to carry the concept over into art. The students are currently in the process of creating 3-dimensional shape sculptures. They have learned that by combining shapes (including spheres, rectangle solids, cubes, cones, pyramids and cylinders), they could create almost anything. They made hotels, people, even boats!
And, finally, art in the Sunshine room would never be complete without a little free painting. Free painting is always a great way to explore and experiment using a variety of paint colors. All you need is a little imagination and watch the paintbrush go!
*To all the parents who have donated materials, paper and recycled products: THANK YOU! Sunshine Art would not be the same without your generous donations!
Music and Movement
The children have been sharing many stories with each other. They love having a specified time for sharing and it gets harder each day to ask them to wrap up their stories so that others may have turns. They are all so excited to tell their friends about things they do at home with parents, families and friends!
We have also been discussing feelings. Using the book Glad Monster, Sad Monster, the children have shared what makes them angry and what makes them sad. Ms. Kristin also plans to continue with feelings and perform puppet shows to help the children further discuss feelings and how we should handle them.
This time of day has also been used to learn songs about trees and the rain forest. These songs have corresponding movements to help the children remember where in space certain tree parts/rain forest layers are located. The children have learned “The Tree Song” which is to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”
Leaves, branches, trunk and roots
Trunk and roots
Leaves, branches, trunk and roots
Trunk and roots
Trees are important to you and me
Leaves, branches, trunk and roots
Trunk and roots
They also learned “There are Four Layers in the Rain Forest” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know it.”
There are 4 layers in the rain forest
There are 4 layers in the rain forest
Forest floor, understory, canopy, emergent
There are 4 layers in the rain forest
Foreign Languages
In Chinese class, the children learned new vocabulary and reinforced their learning by playing games. They learned how to say some color names and played color bingo as well as red light, green light—all in Chinese! They learned how to say the names of foods and then had a picnic in which they asked for the food they wanted in Chinese. Finally, they learned the words for big and small, pointed to big and small objects in the room, saying the words in Chinese, and were introduced to the Chinese characters that represent these words.
Spanish class is merely the formal part of Ms. Dora’s language program. A big part of learning Spanish, which is true of any language, is incorporating it into everyday life.
Here is an example of how this is done with Spanish: When Ms. Dora arrives in the Sunshine Room, the children spontaneously greet her in Spanish. Some will say, “¡Buenos días!” while the others say, “¡Buenas tardes!” Ms. Dora’s smile (or puzzled look) clues in the clueless as to which salutation is correct for the time of day.
Lunchtime is a great time to practice Spanish vocabulary. As different foods are offered, cries of “¡papas! (potatoes)”, “¡queso! (cheese)”, “¡pan! (bread)”, “¡cuchara! (spoon)” ring out. Someone yells, “plata (money)” but, oops, Ms. Dora looks funny, so somebody perks up and says the correct word: “¡plato! (plate), not ¡plata”! Other Spanish food words the children are learning are: carne (meat), ensalada (salad), huevos (eggs), manzana (apple), and banana (you guessed it).
During a pizza party, one of the children asked, “Ms. Dora, how do you say ‘pizza’ in Spanish?” When they learned that “pizza”, an Italian word, is “pizza” in any language, there was another important discovery in the mystery of languages. This is the most important aspect of learning Spanish, or any other language: We are related throughout the world through language.
Naturally, after the pizza revelation, somebody said: “My daddy knows Italian,” someone else said, “My mom knows Hebrew,” one of the children said, “I know Chinese,” and so forth.
“We are the world,” as the song goes. We really are!
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February Newsletter
What’s been happening
February was an eventful month. We began by receiving the visit of Ms. Paulina, a teacher from Heliantus Preschool in Warsaw, Poland. She observed our classes and also shared her knowledge with us. First, she read a Polish story to the children. Then, the children made masks related to the story. The third part of the activity was to dramatize the story.
Ms. Paulina brought some gifts for the Sunshine Roomers. Among the presents was a map of the world that the children in Heliantus had made especially for us. The map has a string that stretches from Poland to the United States, reflecting the friendship of the children at The Seed with the children from Heliantus. Since it was February, The Seed children made valentines for Paulina to take back with her to our friends in Poland.
Groundhog Day was the occasion for all kinds of activities related to weather and shadows.
We celebrated 100 days of school by baking 100 cookies, reading books about celebrating the 100th day in school, and counting, counting, counting.
Valentine’s Day was a great opportunity for writing letters. We learned how to format a letter, how to address envelopes, and played post office with mailboxes and mailbags.
We celebrated Chinese New Year in many ways. We read Chinese stories, we read books about how Chinese New Year is celebrated in our country, and learned about the Chinese zodiac. Most children in the Sunshine Room were born in the Year of the Monkey. Mr. Lin, Christopher’s dad, came to talk to the children about Chinese culture and Chinese New Year. Christopher’s mom made a yummy rice cake for snack. Thank you, Mr. Lin and Ms. Gao, for sharing your culture with us! Gung Hay Fat Choy!
Language Arts
Kindergarten
The kindergartners have been reading more and more books. They have even started teaching the Pre-Ks to read at independent reading time—this is very inspiring! They have worked a lot on beginning and ending blends in creating words. They have also created a new and improved list of their sight words and a list of rhyming words.
The children have also been reading poems that relate to the February holidays. These poems include “Ten sets of Ten” for the 100th day of school, “Ten Valentines” for Valentines Day and, most recently, “Chinese Dragon” for Chinese New Year.
Pre-K
The Spotted Kittens have finished the consonants and moved on to vowels. We saved these for last since, in Zoo-phonics parlance, vowels are the “hardest workers” and have more than one sound. In our first activity, the children traced their hands on paper and cut these out. Then they wrote a vowel on each finger. We now use these hand cutouts to help remember the vowels. Our next activity was reading rhyming books with the different short vowel sounds. We continued with coloring worksheets, which use pictures that include the different sounds that the letters make. The children have been great with coming up with words using the vowels sounds.
Science
We began the month by learning about groundhogs and other animals that hibernate. The children answered many questions such as: What is hibernation? What do animals need to do before they hibernate? Which animals hibernate? We also discussed what it means when a groundhog sees its shadow, and each group took a survey: Will the groundhog see its shadow? There were mixed results!
We then began talking about animals that don’t hibernate, but live in very wintry places—Antarctica and the Arctic. Each of the Sunshine Room groups made a list of which animals live in each habitat and focused on a particular group of animals in each place. We spoke mainly about Emperor Penguins (the children watched March of the Penguins during movie time to reinforce their learning) and polar bears. It was amazing how much the children already knew about each animal and during a discussion post-movie, they all shared facts they learned from it. The kindergartners spoke about Antarctica and the Arctic as habitats, discussing where animals find food, water, shelter and space. The Spotted Kittens listened to various stories about the animals in these habitats.
All the children learned that polar bears live on chunks of ice in the Arctic. They all learned that polar bears weigh a lot (770-1,500 pounds, to be exact!). So how do polar bears stay afloat on the ocean? As an extension activity, and to help answer this question, the children spent the latter part of the month utilizing the water table to test various classroom objects to see if they would sink or float. Part of this activity involved making predictions beforehand and seeing if their predictions were borne out in practice.
Handwriting
Throughout the month of February, the children continued to learn more lowercase letters: this month it was l, k, y, j, p, r and n. The children also took a break from learning individual letters to practice putting together the letters they’d already learned to form short words, such as jet, yet, cook, cats, dogs, log, like, love, dug, and wag. They used the Handwriting Without Tears chalkboards to help them practice proper sizing of their letters. The kindergartners continued to review their uppercase letters in their workbooks.
Math
Groundhog Day gave us the opportunity to practice the steps of data collection. First, the children took an opinion survey of their classmates and teachers, asking whether or not the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. After completing the survey, each child constructed a graph to show the results of the data they had collected.
The celebration of 100 days was a great way to practice counting to 100. Each child was invited to bring in 100 objects to school. And they did! Contributions varied from shiny stones, to legos, to letters, and many more interesting objects. We counted these objects by ones and by tens. We learned to skip-count by tens, fives and twos. We did this by using number mats and actually jumping on the numbers.
The children were fascinated by all the possibilities the abacus offers and started adding and subtracting on their own.
The kindergartners learned the difference between even and odd numbers after reading the story Even Steven and Odd Todd, and using counters to distinguish between the two.
Finally, the children learned the ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.).
Drama
The children used the groundhog shadow puppets they made in art for doing shadow theatre. First, the teacher told a groundhog story, and later every child had a chance to make up their own story with shadow puppets. Thank you to the Armstrong family who donated the puppet shadow theatre!
The children played post office and learned all the steps from mailing a letter until it reaches its destination. They wrote a letter to one of their friends, addressed the envelope (with return address and all), took turns selling and buying stamps at the pretend post office, and then delivered the letter.
During the week of celebration of Chinese New Year, the children dramatized a Chinese folktale. First they read The Most Beautiful Thing in the World, then they picked roles, and using some props they put on the play. They enjoyed it so much that they did it several times, each time changing roles.
Art
What a busy time for art in the Sunshine Room. The month of February brought many holiday celebrations, including Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year.
The children made Ground hog puppets for our shadow puppet theater using oil pastels, Popsicle sticks and construction paper.
For Valentine’s Day, they made their very own valentine blot paintings. Using a pre-cut heart, they painted one side with a variety of valentine colors (pinks, reds and purples). Then they folded the heart in half. How amazed they were to realize they had painted the clean side of their heart simply by folding it! They finished their valentines by adding red glitter and bright tissue paper for additional decoration.
For Chinese New Year, the children created red stained glass lanterns using copier transparencies, red tissue paper, gold glitter and red party streamers.
February was also a very important month because the Sunshine Roomers celebrated their 100th day of school! To help celebrate this important day, everyone helped make a three-layer “cake” sculpture using tempera paint and cardboard boxes! We even included 100 candles on the cake itself.
Our biggest project for February was our 3-dimensional shape sculptures. Using recycled cardboard boxes and paper towel tubes, the children created one-of-a-kind sculptures. They began this project by learning about different 3-D shapes with Ms. Diane. The shapes they handled included rectangular prisms, spheres, cylinders, pyramids, cones and cubes. Once students understood the shapes, they were given the opportunity to make all these shapes into something else. Students chose five or six shapes to make into a sculpture, using masking tape and glue to combine them in unique ways. Once their sculptures had dried, then came the fun part—painting them, using a variety of brightly-colored tempera paints. After the paint dried, decorating their sculpture was the next step. The sculptors used a variety of objects to embellish their works of art, including sea shells, marker caps, glitter, sea glass, metal rings, jewels, straws, stones, marbles, bouncy balls, feathers, buttons, ribbon, yarn, felt and Styrofoam.
The children even carried this project over into their writer’s workshop activity by writing about their sculptures! Our sculpture project thus incorporated math, the arts and writing! WOW!
Yet another art activity this month was creating marbled paper with shaving cream and watercolor paints. Marbled paper made from shaving cream? Absolutely! Students began by spraying a large pile of shaving cream onto an art mat. Using a selection of watercolors, the artists dripped various colors onto the shaving cream pile. Once their colors were added, they used their pointer finger to swish and swirl their shaving cream. They watched in fascination as their colors blended together and small drops became long, swirly lines. They then took a white piece of paper and placed it on top of their shaving cream and slowly pressed down with one hand. They then peeled off their paper and wiped the excess shaving cream off. TaDa! The swirls magically appeared onto their paper and made marbled paper! This turned out to be a favorite project.
Yet another fun art activity: Creating a painting inspired by the book, Mouse Paint. This book tells the story of three white mice that learn about colors—i.e., when you mix primary colors (red, yellow and blue), you make secondary colors (purple, orange and green). The children created mouse paintings by using two fingers to represent mice feet. They were amazed that by mixing colors together they could create new ones.
Our busy artists also created a project we call “Yarn Weaves”. In this activity, they learned about the different types of lines (diagonal, vertical and horizontal) and how these lines can make a picture. They wove different-colored pieces of yarn around a black piece of cardstock that had slits cut into the sides to keep the yarn in place. Once all the slits were used, the design was complete.
We also made collage robots this month. Using a variety of different-colored shapes and sizes, the children created their very own robots. This activity gave the children the chance to review the different parts of the body.
After hearing about the sad events in Haiti, the Sunshine Room students decided to spread some cheer to the children of Haiti by making beautiful hand-painted flowers and spin art.
Thank you again to all the parents who have donated materials for art. We appreciate all that you give us! Also, special thanks to Isabel’s mom, Mrs. Armstrong. Your wonderful ideas for Chinese New Year were much appreciated!
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March Newsletter
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April Newsletter
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May Newsletter
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June Newsletter
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July Newsletter
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August Newsletter
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September Newsletter
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October Newsletter
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November Newsletter
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December Newsletter
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