Pre-K/Kindergarten News March 14, 2014

This weeks happenings...

Snack Bar
The Healthy Shark Snack Bar has made its debut and is very popular. It will be available every Friday morning. If a student goes home with a red face any day during the week or has two yellow faces, they will not be able to participate.

We learned about three different kinds of habitats: deserts, forests, and grasslands. We read about them and the plants and animals (and sometimes people) who live there. Then we drew them and recreated them on a large scale on our island, placing our animals in the correct habitat. Along with learning about each habitat, we read and watched videos about things that threaten each habitat. We drew pictures of the hazards each of them face and wrote a sentence about them. We went on a 3-D shape hunt in our classroom and documented the spheres, cylinders, cones and cubes that we found. We compared and contrasted 2-D and 3-D shapes this week and the kids watched a silly video with some rhymes to help us remember the 3-D shapes. We also explored time in math and timed how many claps it took us to get across the room in different ways skipping, crawling, walking on tiptoes, running... Then we talked about why claps might not be the best way to tell time. We introduced the standard second and talked about how people everywhere can keep time the same way using seconds to count. We learned the digraph ph this week and the kids learned that ph makes the same sound as f. We talked about dolphins, elephants, gophers and amphibians that have the ph sound. We got some new technology in our class so weve rearranged a little to accommodate. The kids are loving watching videos on the big screen!

Help at home! Ask your child to show you the action and tell you the sound of the letter combination we learned this week: ph Review the letter combinations weve talked about so far: ai, oa, ie, ee, or, ng, oo, ou, oi, ar, and er. For at least 20 minutes every day, read together! Ask questions about the story and record it on your reading log. Practice our new sight words together: out, your, too, and went. Talk about the plants and animals that you see around you!

Key assignment

We will be presenting our Key Assignment during the school day on Friday, March 21. We will begin at 10:15 and then we invite you to bring a picnic lunch for you and your child and eat with us in our classroom. Together we can celebrate a unit well-done!

The kids drew pictures of plants and animals that live in the desert. We also wrote about different kinds of amphibians, like the salamander and the newt.

Drawing and writing ph words in our digraph books. We had some awesome artwork!

The kids painted our grasslands. We chose a Savanna to paint. There are different colored grasses in the Savanna depending on the time of year. Grasslands face the threats of fire and clearing of the land for farming or cattleraising.

Our new rug works perfectly for our new arrangement!

The kids found all sorts of 3-D shapes around our room on our 3-D shapes hunt!