Kindergarten

On Monday we read the story Thanking the Moon, Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival by Grace Lin. This sweet story highlights the author’s family traditions as they picnic under the full moon, thank the moon and send the moon secret wishes. We looked at pictures of beautiful, yummy mooncakes and thought about our own secret wishes.

We caught “fish” in the “pond” and used our catch to explore the number combinations we use to make 7. No “fish tales” here—every child caught the big one and created a number story to represent their expert fishing. Ask your child how many fish they caught and how many were left in the pond. We are continuing to practice numeral formation, as well.

We are beginning to explore the Breathing Tool, the first tool in our Toolbox program. We read the story Each Breath a Smile by Sister Susan, which is based on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. This story highlights the power and calming properties of breathing. We talked about times when the Breathing Tool might be helpful at school and at home. We decorated our own paper toolboxes, cut out a Breathing Tool icon, and tucked it into our toolboxes. Fully stocked toolboxes will be sent home once all tools have been introduced. Practice at home!

We officially began a writer's workshop this week by asking “Why do people write?” We talked about and looked at many examples and modeled a picture story for the children. See if your child can tell you the story about our dog, Bailey. The children confidently worked on their own pieces of writing, many adding careful details to their illustrations. We emphasize that writers convey meaning through both pictures and print.Throughout our writer’s workshop lessons, we talk about strategies for “finding” our stories, with focus on writing about what we know and about small moments from our lives. Giving children opportunities to tell and create their own stories gives them great motivation to write. Writing perseverance grows leaps and bounds as we make our way through the school year. Ask your child what they wrote about this week!

We have been reading wordless picture books. Valuing the importance of detailed pictures to tell a story, pointing out information gathered from the pictures, thinking about story sequencing, predicting and adjusting our ideas as the story reveals itself are all important reading skills. Wordless picture books give children an accessible way to practice these skills without needing to read words. Wordless books also validate the work children do as they convey their own writing through pictures. See if your child can retell the story, Good Dog Carl!

Before library time on Thursday, we took a bit of time to think about the books we had selected last week. We learned how to share a quick summary, a reason why a book was liked or not and how to recommend a book to friends. Several children offered to share and did an amazing job!

There are monsters in kindergarten! They are wonderfully creative construction paper monsters right out of your child’s imagination. We read The Monsters’ Party to highlight the word “can” and the word family “an” as a part of our word of the day work. We also discovered the Snap words—”I,” “in,” “the” and “like”—in the story.

On Thursday we went on a long hike to discover cool places around campus and in our school forest. It was very exciting! On Friday we played in the kindergarten backyard! The children were busy making pudding, collecting worms, building stick forts, creating art from rocks and tree blocks. Children also problem solved as they used rocks, wood, and other natural objects in an effort to balance two baskets on a scale.