Highlights September 2014

I love this photo of students doing independent reading. The kids have already grown their attention span this past month. They now read independently for about 10 minutes every day at the beginning of class. An important first step to reading is using picture clues to understand a story or get information. I invite one student every day to share something from a book. This helps students develop oral communication skills, and the ability to retell a story.

Dramatic play is another really important way that students build vocabulary and develop oral communication skills. Here, students pretend to have a picnic with their forest friends. They went to the store to buy the food, and prepared the picnic together. They negotiated who would play which part in their play. By sticking to their chosen role in the play, they are developing their ability to pay attention (i.e. self-regulation). Also, note that by pretending they are someone else they are learning how other people feel and act. Perspective-taking is an important social skill to develop, particularly at this age. For these reasons and more, you will see that play is an integral part of our classroom.

We also have a space (upstairs) designated for more quiet, focused work. Math skills we have worked on this month include recognizing numbers 1-6 and measuring the length of various objects. Here, a student must put the numbers 1-6 in sequence then place the correct number of insect counters under each number.

 Here, students play a game to practice recognizing the numbers 1-6 on some dice. They roll a die and remove that number of ladybugs from their game board. The first person to remove all the ladybugs wins the game. (A side benefit here is that students also get to practice taking turns.)

 After reading the  book Inch by Inch (by Leo Lionni), students were invited to measure objects in the play room with an inchworm ruler. Here a student measures the fridge on the play kitchen.

Another student measures our doorbell house, and is then inspired to build his own house with magnet blocks and measure it. I loved this!

 Another day, we used various objects (spoons, markers, trains, etc.) to measure the length of our bodies. Students extended this play when they encountered chain links at the table. The children initiated the idea of using the chain links to measure their bodies. We counted how many links tall they were. Then they cooperated to build a chain that spanned the entire play room! (This was great fine motor work, connecting all those little chains together.)

When I saw that most students were understanding how to measure length, we used the ruler as a tool during a science investigation of worms.

 Students first observed with their eyes to see how worms moved. Then they explored the worms with their hands to see how worms felt.

 We used our rulers to measure the length of the worms. We found the shortest worm and the longest worm. We learned we could put the worms in order from shortest to longest.

We later practiced this math skill and this new vocabulary with pieces of yarn cut to different lengths. For example, we measured pieces of yarn and said, "This worm is long. This worm is longer. This worm is the longest."

We are also learning how to use magnifying glasses to look closely. One student noticed that worms look like they have a "band-aid" around them. Another student noticed the worms did not have eyes or a nose, just a mouth. They liked to watch the worms dig and tunnel through the soil with their magnifying glasses.

Students recorded observations in their science journals in the form of drawings and dictations. I noticed students really wanted to describe how the worms moved and felt, but often didn't have the words to describe. They would start moving their bodies to show me, and ask me to dictate.

I take the time to record students' dictations because I believe that students need to see that their ideas and experiences are important enough to be written down. I believe it will give them a desire to write. Here are some describing words students did use:

Seth: "The worm scribbled off my hand."
Easton: "Worms are smooth and wobbly."
Luke: "I named my worm Stretchy."

I helped them learn more words to describe a worm. (A worm feels slimy, wet, squishy. When a worm moves it wiggles, squirms, slithers, stretches, shrinks). I hope students are beginning to see the power of words to describe!

During outside time, students have been working like engineers to build bridges across our stepping logs. They like to see if they can balance on the bridges. They also discovered that under the logs are all kinds of bugs.

I explained that scientists call bugs "insects" if they have six legs. If a bug doesn't have six legs, it's not an insect. As we find small creatures, we count the legs to see if it is an insect or not.

We have found many insects, including a beetle, box elder bugs, ants, and a dragonfly all of which do have six legs. We have also found millipedes with lots of legs, spiders with eight legs, and slugs with 0 legs. (Not insects!)

Here is a spider the kids found in my basement window well. And on the other side of the house, we found a huge spider web in the rose bush. We have been observing it.

This student found a giant banana slug at home and brought it to school for "science". Thanks to all those parents who helped your child capture an amazing creature and share it with our class this month. This simple practice of bringing science to school helps open your child's eyes to the science happening all around them!

On the first day of fall, we went on a nature walk in the neighborhood to observe the trees and see if they were starting to change colors. (I forgot my camera.) The children were surprised to discover so many kinds of seeds growing in the trees. The seeds became the highlight of the day, not the leaves. Which was great! We found maple seeds, acorns, pinecones, sycamore seeds (spiky balls), crab apples, and "rattle snakes" in the locust tree.

Children played with train tracks and wooden blocks this month, both of which came from trees! We have some great builders in this class!

We learned to use water color paints in red and yellow. When the colors mixed on our paper, we discovered orange. We stamped leaves that we had collected from the trees on our walk. The art work was beautiful.

Interestingly, when a student brought a feather for science we compared the feather to a fall leaf. We watched them fall to the ground. We noticed that the feather fell more slowly than the leaf. We did it again and counted how long it took for each object to fall. Next, we compared the leaf to a shoe. We noticed the shoe fell quickly! One student asked, "Why do leaves fall slow?" Great question! We added this to our question board. 

Our study topic for next month will be trees, leaves...and gravity. Something I did not anticipate. I love it when the students' questions direct our learning. Parents, I hope your children are enjoying school. Please contact me if you'd like to talk about anything. Feel free to volunteer in the classroom as well!
Best,
Teacher April

P.S. Please review the following uppercase letters with your student: C, G, S, E, L, O, A, W, I. These are the letters we tried to master this month. Thanks! (Here, students are fishing for letters in the sand and water table.)