Thanksgiving Fun!

Hello family and friends!

This has been such a fun week for us in the Aalva class as we prepare for Thanksgiving. We've talked a lot about what Thanksgiving means to us and our different traditions. We've also focused on the idea of family. This week, we've learned more about the differences and similarities in each of our families and what we value from time spent together with them. I always enjoy the times when we talk about our family differences. It's a great time for us to ask questions, learn something new, and focus on respecting traditions that are new to us.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, Rabbi Meir had mentioned that we should be careful when talking about Native Americans. He told us to remember not to stereotype them, which in turn would be disrespecting them. I knew that there were several directions we could take this subject. And to be honest with you, at one point I contemplated skipping it all together, as it can tend to be a touchy subject. However, Michelle and I knew it was an important subject to address. Because I have family members who are Native American, I first thought about bringing in some authentic artifacts from various family members and talk about their culture. However, after thinking about it, I wondered if maybe the kids only had a concept of Native American history. If so, I wanted to show them that Native Americans are very much alive and present in our society today. We decided to start by asking the kids what they knew about Native Americans. They told us a list of answers, including...

• they are strong
• they can fly
• they grow big gardens
• they use bow and arrows
• they are really called Indians
• they are bad guys
• they only walk (when I asked if they drove cars, they laughed and said no way)
• they are not alive today

After hearing these answers we knew that we needed to give them a different view of Native Americans. I prefaced our talk by reminding them that it's important to know Native American history (just like it's important to know our own history), but that I also wanted us to recognize that they are people just like we are. We focused on different tribes that are still present today in South Carolina. We brought in a map of our state and discussed the different tribes and where they live in comparison to where we live in Columbia. We also brought in pictures of Native American children in the present day. We saw that they go to school just like us, dress like us, read the same books that we do in our classroom, use markers like us, live in homes like us, and have families just like we do. It took a couple of days for these new ideas to sink in so we made sure to talk about it throughout the week. We left our present day pictures up in the room for them to visit and discuss. If you think about it over Thanksgiving,  bring up the subject and see what they say. I'd love to know their thoughts!

Our Native American discussion also lead us to our discussion of family. We discussed how all families are not the same. Some of us have siblings and some of us are the only child in the house. Some of us have both parents living at home and some of us have two homes that we get to visit. Some of us have grandparents that live with us and some of us travel to visit grandparents. We concluded that no matter how our families looks, they are valuable, loved, and important to us. With this discussion, we also made family portraits. This is something that I thought would only take one afternoon to complete. I had envisioned them quickly drawing their family members and then moving on to something new. I was SO wrong! The attention to detail in these portraits is amazing. Michelle and I sat down with each child individually as they worked and we talked in detail about each family member. We talked about what we loved about them, what we enjoyed doing with them, what they looked like, etc. Everyone drew their family members and then used art supplies to decorate them any way they chose. I think the quickest family portrait was done in 35 minutes. I'm so impressed by the attention they put into these. It ended up taking us a couple of days to complete them, which bumped out some other things we had planned, but we felt like it was worth it! We had some precious conversations. A couple of parents have asked if we helped the kids make these - nope! It's all their hard work. Check them out if you get some time. They'll be hanging up in the hallway near our classroom door through next week.

During all of our Thanksgiving talk the past two weeks, we realized that just about all of us have had pumpkin pie on our minds. We decided that instead of making a real one (even though that would be so yummy), we would try to make a pie using play dough. We were able to find a recipe that was edible and that could be flavored. We made it and dyed it orange then everyone ate a small sample. The kids loved it! I wasn't a fan at all. I'm not sure if it was the flavor or the consistency of play dough that completely grossed me out! Either way, the kids thought it was awesome and that's all that matters :) We put the play dough in a pie pan and divided it into pieces. We counted and talked about cutting it into halves and fourths. Then, we pulled out housekeeping materials and the room quickly turned into a pumpkin-pie-making factory! Everyone had abandoned their toys and the tables were full. They made pumpkin muffins too and served them to each other. It was a fun time of counting, cutting, and serving one another!

I also want to share that the kids will be performing a dance for the Chanukah play on December 17th. Morah Devorah introduced us to the music this week so we've been spending some time each day listening to it and getting used to it. We'll start learning the dance soon and the kids seem eager to get started. As a reminder, I won't be writing a post next week since it's a short school week. We will be closed Wednesday - Friday. I hope everyone enjoys this next week with family and friends. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Approaches to Learning:

• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 
• Show ability to focus attention for increasing variety of chosen tasks and activities for short periods of time (10-20 minutes).
• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.

Social & Emotional:

• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Show awareness and respond to feelings of others with adult guidance and support.
• Stand up for rights much of the time.
• Describe characteristics of self and others. 
• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud. 
• Begin to distinguish between real and make-believe in stories read aloud. 
• Relate information from texts to personal experience. 
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in their environment.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as". 

Creating our family portraits...

Serving pumpkin pie...

Cutting pie into halves and fourths for sharing...

Making and sorting pumpkin muffins and other yummy foods...

Thankfulness

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Aalva class! With Thanksgiving approaching, we've been spending some time talking about the holiday and what it means to us. We will be continuing this throughout the rest of the month. We started the week by asking the kids what they thought "thanksgiving" meant. The majority of our answers revolved around food and playing. It opened the door for some great conversations about time spent with family and friends. We have recorded these answers and hung them up in the hallway if you'd like to check them out. As we continue to talk about Thanksgiving during the next two weeks, we're interested to see how these answers change and expand.

One of the main things we wanted to focus on through our study was the idea of being thankful. We discussed that being thankful is something we feel all through the year...not just on Thanksgiving. We discussed the definition of being "thankful" and agreed that it meant "to be glad you have something in your life". We decided that we tend to be thankful for the things we love and the things that mean the most to us. After talking and reading about being thankful we made a classroom thankful tree. We had the students make leaves using their hand tracings. After tracing their own hand, they cut them out, and wrote a word to describe what they were thankful for. After making our leaves, we went outside into the woods to find some branches. We knew that we wanted the branches to fit inside a vase so we measured our vase and then took some rulers out to measure branches. We looked for ones that were at least two feet long so that they would stick up high enough to hold several leaves. This was a great time exploring the beginning phases of the school's outdoor classroom! There is a path through the woods that leads to an open field that has recently been cleared (we can't wait to see the final product of the new outdoor space!). We measured our sticks and brought them in to assemble our thankful tree. We told the kids that they could add to our tree whenever they wanted to. Anytime they thought of another reason to be thankful, they could make a new leave and hang it up. We have added some cookie cutters for tracing in our art center along with a hole puncher and yarn. The kids have really been excited about this activity and have made everything by themselves! Their tree is sitting outside our classroom door. If you have time, stop by and read some of their sweet notes!

During our thankful discussion we also decided it might be fun to make our own book. This is something that the kids have started doing on their own during their center time. Many of them pull out paper throughout the day and staple it and draw pictures. I think some of this was encouraged by the first grade class a few weeks ago. They came by our classroom with homemade books and read them to us...which the kids loved! Making books has been a hobby in our room ever since. We titled our books, "My Thankful Book". At the top of each page there is written, "I am thankful for...". In our room during read alouds, we talk a lot about what it means to be authors and illustrators. We brought this discussion up again before starting our books. We reminded the kids that they would be both the author and illustrator of this book as they would be the ones to write their thankful words and draw pictures to go along with them. This was a great time for them to focus on the beginning stages of writing. We were so impressed with how sweet and meaningful these books turned out! They will be on display in the hallway this month if you'd like to read them.

Throughout these discussions of being thankful, we have also touched on the idea of traditions. We talked about the fact that each family is different and has different ways that they celebrate Thanksgiving. We talked about differences in the foods we eat, the people we spend time with, the languages spoken in our homes, where our families come from, and any other ideas that the kids brought to the table. We found out that we all have some similarities and differences. We were able to share in our similarities and learn through our differences. It was a great discussion that will hopefully have the kids talking at home about your own family life and traditions. If anyone has any special traditions they'd like share with the class, we'd love to hear about them through pictures, artifacts, etc. Feel free to bring some stuff in or stop by to share your traditions with the class.

I also wanted to take some time in this update to tell everyone about our morning message. Our morning message is written on the dry erase board each morning and read aloud during our morning meeting. We keep the first two sentences the same which are..."Good morning! Today is (day of the week).". The third sentence is always different and discusses what we will do that day or anything important we'd like to tell the class. Throughout the year we've progressed from me reading the message, to the kids reading it with me, to dissecting it (which we've just recently started). We have the kids come up and find words or letters that they know and circle them. They have recently been asking for "tricky" words so we've been adding some challenges each week! This is a great way for us to discuss letters, sight words, punctuation, sentence forms, as well as reading. Even though some of these concepts aren't taught until later in kindergarten, we feel like it's never too early to expose the kids to new ideas! If it clicks with them, then that's great. If it doesn't, then hopefully it'll make those concepts even easier to understand once that time comes for them. I say all this to brag on your sweet ones! They have really embraced this new activity and are always quick to ask for it if I ever forget. I'm so impressed with their desire to learn and their eagerness to try new things!

Here are just a few standards that were covered this week...

Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, or problems. 
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one more more ways.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction. 
• Participate in group life of class.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play. 
• Express fears and concerns to familiar adults.

Language & Literacy:

• Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
• Use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
• Combine some letters with pretend writing.
• Makes some upper case letters without regard to proportion or placement.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language. 
• Creates a pictures and labels it orally.
• Describe events of personal significance.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Understand and use positional words to describe the locations of objects (up, down, in, over, under, behind, on top of and in front of).
• Identify and copy simple patterns.

Writing on thankful leaves...

Searching/measuring for the perfect tree branches...

                                               

Assembling our tree...

We are authors and illustrators...

Kids in the Kitchen

Hello family and friends!

This week we did a spin off from our study of chocolate milk. We thought we might be spending some more time on milk, but the kids took it in a different direction. After making our ice cream last week the kids became interested in recipes. We have a few recipe books in our housekeeping center that we noticed them looking through as well as using our pretend oven to bake and cook. It ended up being a really fun week of recipes!

To start off the week, I brought in a wide range of recipe books. We talked about the general concepts of a recipe. We discussed different types of measurements and how combining ingredients creates a new substance. We discussed the importance of reading and following directions so that we get the correct result from our recipe. We kept some measuring tools out in our room the first day for the kids to explore and match numbers from our recipes with the numbers on our measuring tools. We also spent some time researching recipes. During our reading workshop we allowed the kids to look through different types of recipe books and find things that interested them. After looking through them, everyone shared with the class their favorite recipe and why they'd like to try it. Most of these recipes consisted of sweets and foods involving fruit. We discussed and agreed that one sweet recipe and one fruit recipe would be good to try throughout the week.

The first recipe we made was not edible. We wanted to show the kids that not every recipe out there is for food. We follow directions and combine substances to make all different types of objects. For our first recipe we made salt dough. It consisted of a basic recipe that would be easy to follow and "cook". Our recipe called for flour, salt, and water. We discussed the different ingredients and our measuring tools before starting. Next, we let the kids work in groups to make their own salt dough. After combining the ingredients, each kid got a clump of dough and formed it into anything they wanted. Most salt dough recipes involve cooking the final product on low heat for several hours, but we were able to find one that could be microwaved for only 3 minutes...which worked out perfectly for us! The kids were able to plate their creations, put them in the microwave, and cook them all on their own...which they loved! After the salt dough became hard from cooking, the kids painted them. These creations are now out on display in the hallway if you'd like to check them out. And here's our recipe if anyone is interested in making some at home...

1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup of water
1 cup of flour

Add the salt and flour in a bowl and slowly add water. You may not need all the water as you want the dough to be dry...if too sticky at more flour. Shape the dough and then microwave for 3 minutes. If dough is still wet after 3 mins, put it back in for another 30 seconds until done.

Our next recipe was definitely edible! We let the kids look through the recipe books and find their top 3 favorite sweet treats, then we voted on our favorite. Thankfully this resulted in a simple cookie recipe involving only a few ingredients :) Again we discussed our ingredients and measurements before starting. This time we let the kids taste some of the ingredients to try them before they were combined. We watched as simple sugar and eggs turned light and fluffy. We watched as our ingredients changed colors and shapes as more ingredients were added. This recipe involved using a mixer so the kids thought it was awesome! They combined all of our ingredients and watched as we mixed them together. Afterwards, they shaped the dough and we painted them using food coloring and some water. After the kids got them just the way they wanted them, we baked the cookies for about 10 mins. They turned out great!

Our next recipe was really simple but may have been the kid's favorite (it definitely got the most comments and they kept asking for more). We made fruit kabobs. This actually worked out perfectly because Rabbi Meir gave us a Hebrew copy of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". We read the book in English and talked about the different foods the caterpillar ate, some were healthy and some were not. That morning, Morah Devorah came in and read us the Hebrew translation of the book as well. After discussing and hearing both versions of the book, we made kabobs using the same types of fruits the caterpillar ate in the book. We cut up the fruit into small pieces and placed a number by each plate. The kids got their stick and walked down the line of plates adding the amount of each fruit to their stick that matched the number next to plate. They found out that if they counted and added just like the "recipe" numbers told them, that their stick filled up just right and we were eating a wide range of colorful fruit! We also spent some time this week writing our own recipes. This has been a fun way for us to work on recognizing and writing numbers, as well practicing with some pretend writing. We also drew pictures of these recipes and talked about what they were. All these things are the beginning stages of writing and mastering our fine motor skills.

Finally, I must announce that we have welcomed back David this week! This was a big day for the kids. They have pretty much been asking when he'll back at school since he left for Israel a month ago. We would talk about his return during our morning meeting and show the kids when he would be back and count down using a calendar. They also wanted to make him a gift for his return so we made him a welcome back banner. They actually spent most of one morning working on this awesome banner! Morah Devorah also helped the kids make one in Hebrew so he would have one of each. It has been so sweet to watch their thoughtfulness and excitement to see their friend. We're so happy to have you back, David!!

Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of actives, tasks, and learning centers.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Understand that a task can be accomplished through several steps

Social & Emotional:

• Stand up for rights much of the time.
• Use classroom materials responsibility, most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy:

• Distinguish between descriptions of story events and spoken words of characters.
• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
• Incorporate favorite parts of literacy texts into play activities.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Display curiosity and interest in learning new words.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.

Pretend play in our kitchen...

We love cooking!

Counting to create fruit kabobs...

Adding the final touches to our cookies & salt dough creations...

Welcome back, David!