Reinforcing Skills

As we approach the end of the school year (can you believe it???) I like to go back and reinforce many of the learned skills in math, reading and writing, and continue to dig a little deeper into the concept.  You will notice that more worksheets will be coming home, especially in math to show what we are doing and at what level your child is working on.

This week I have also starting taking the Bumblebees through the writing process as we begin our first formal narrative. Their stories about snorkeling in a tidepool incorporate many new facts about the habitat and animals that live there. I have been beyond impressed with all of them!  I am aiming for about a 6-8 page book, with about 2-5 sentences on a page!  This is above and beyond any kindergarten expectation and with teacher modeling, each child has been so successful! What's even more is that they are incorporating this personalities into their writing through the style and how they organize their thoughts.  I hope the debut will be on May 17 when we are to present at the next gathering.  More to come later...

These pictures were from science this week.  We were testing the effects of salt water and buoyancy (sink and float).

I use games to reinforce many math skills. This game is being done using addition and multiplication for those who are ready for it.

And of course, it wouldn't be kindergarten if we couldn't paint...

Jellyfish watercolors

"Create a Fish" inspired by the book, Hooray for Fish!

Future Marine Biologists?

As we continue to discover many habitats of the world, the Bumblebees have begged me to study the ocean.  So, I am taking a small part of it, an ocean tide pool, and examining the invertebrate animals and plant life within the pool.  The nice thing is that we live near many rocky shores, and have a trip planned in the future on a minus tide day. We will be conducting many experiments comparing salt and fresh water, buoyancy and surface tension. We will be creating models of the animals in the tidepools and discuss the unique characteristics of these animals vs. many in the deeper ocean. Below are some pictures showing us getting a first look at some of the animals to be studied in detail, and begin thinking about what we NOTICE, and what we WONDER.

Learning Parts of Speech through Literature

Over the past two weeks, I have been using literature to formally introduce parts of speech.  To begin, we started with Quick as a Cricket, by Audrey Wood.  This book was a great introduction to adjectives and similes. The Bumblebees wrote their own similes based on the book.

Next, we read Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak.  Not only were we creating lists of adjectives to describe the wild things, we also learned about verbs and nouns.  Over the course of a week, we took very boring sentences, (Wild things run.) and added other parts of speech and details to spruce up the sentence and make it more interesting. (Hairy blue wild things run through the forest at night.)  We took these sentences and made them into story problems to share with the prekindergarten class.