The last few weeks we have discovered how fascinated the children are by motion and things that move. We have explored a variety of different kinds of motion and so far our favorite is marbles! Here are some of the motion explorations we have been trying!
Room8-Kindergarten/PreK
Monday, November 30, 2020
Exploring Motion
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Creating a Classroom Cumminuty
As a way to create a classroom community and a sense of responsibility in the classroom, the children are given a classroom job each week. We rotate the jobs so that every child gets a chance to be every job!
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Morning Meeting
During our Morning Meeting we welcome the children to school as well as say good morning to each other. A big part of this meeting is doing our calendar. We talk about the day of the week, the month and the year. We also find the next number and look at the pattern that the different shapes are making. So far the children have noticed that the pattern for this month is red apple, red apple, green apple, green apple. The patterns will get more difficult each month.
We also keep track of how many days we have been in school. This is exciting for the children because we have already talked about how when we get to 100 days we get to have a special celebration!
At the end of each month the children will be given a blank calendar to fill out using all of the skills they have learned by completing the calendar together each morning!
These are the some of the Kindergarten Standards the children are learning while we complete this task every morning:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.K.1.A Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions (e.g., listening to others and taking turns speaking about the topics and texts under discussion).
K-ESS2-1 Use and share observations of local weather conditions to describe patterns over time.
K-ESS3-2 Ask questions to obtain information about the purpose of weather forecasting to prepare for, and respond to, severe weather.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.K.CC.A.1 Count to 100 by ones and by tens.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.K.CC.A.3 Identify numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).
K – H2.0.1 Distinguish among yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Monday, September 7, 2020
Loose Parts
Loose parts give children the freedom to arrange and rearrange, essentially using the parts to create their own designs, which allows the focus of the experience to be on the process rather than the product.
Below you will find ways we use loose parts in the classroom:
Making the Surface of the moon using white rocks, yarn, cotton balls and aluminum foil balls |
Building with bottle caps |
Using tree and blocks to create a forest |
Making animal habitats with bricks, sticks, gems and rocks |
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Outer Space
Next Generation Science Standards
K-PS2-1 Plan and conduct an investigation to compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object.
Thursday, December 5, 2019
What are the interests of the kids in room 8?
As we explore different emotions, the children have been drawing what their face looks like when they are feeling sad, angry or happy. We introduced emotion stones to the children. They picked a stone, identified how they though the person was feeling then drew their own representation of it on their paper. It was interesting to see how the children made connections to when they felt a certain emotion and why they were feeling that way. We will continue to identify and describe our emotions and we study how the face changes with each feeling.
a. Manages feelings
Next Generation Science Standards
K-PS2-1 Plan and conduct an investigation to compare the effects of different strengths or different directions of pushes and pulls on the motion of an object.
Monday, November 4, 2019
Our Friends From Around the World
The first one was from a school in California called the Early Childhood Learning Center ECLC. We looked at the map to see how far away it was from us and how we would have to travel in order to get there. We learned we could travel either by airplane or by car. It would take longer to get there by car. The children were also very interested in that fact that California does not get snow. They were very curious as to why. Some answers that we heard were "The snow can't make it from Michigan." "It rains a lot in California and it's too hot."