Workshops

Hello family and friends!

This week we decided to spend time in all of our workshops. We have three workshops: reading, writing, and math. During reading workshop this week, we invited the children to play letter BINGO. We wanted to spend time focusing on letters because just like in other areas of development, children develop their letter recognition and phonemic awareness at different rates.  Our goal is not to force the kids into memorizing something that they are not ready for or interested in. Instead, we work to support them wherever they might be and help them learn in ways that are best suited to each individual need. In order to accomplish this we use BINGO because it’s a great way work on all the different aspects of letters, for example: letter recognition, talking about the sounds of each letter, and coming up with words that start with each letter.

During writing workshop this week we asked everyone “What is your favorite part of school?” We encouraged everyone to draw picture and/or write down their answer to our question. Ms. Rachael and I put on some quiet music and let the kids get to work, encouraging them to put as much detail into their writing as possible! After everyone had finish we gathered around in our circle so that everyone could present their writing to the class. Each child presented their journal to the class and explained what they drew and why it was their favorite part of school. This helps students develop social skill and public speaking skills.

Everyone’s favorite workshop is math! Whenever we tell the class we'll be working in math workshop, everyone screams in excitement! During math workshops we set up the room into stations. Each area will have a different activity that helps to develop a different math skill.  Ms. Rachael and I also set up areas with different levels of difficulty. We use a timer to let the kids know when it’s time to switch stations. They can go to any station they choose and make sure that they visit each one. As the students do the activities, Ms. Rachael and I walk around to help with anyone who needs assistance and also to challenge students to do things in a different way.

This month we have also started challenging students more during our morning message time. As you know, each morning we work together as a class to write a morning message on the dry erases board. This is one way for Ms. Rachael I to model reading and writing daily with the children. We have added the writing of the full date (February 18, 2016). The children use the calendar to help figure out each component of the date, week, and month to help spell each word. We have also started asking children to come up and circle site words, punctuation, and letters. This will get them ready for kindergarten when they will be encouraged to write their own morning message with Ms. Becky and Ms. Britney.

As many of you have probably heard we have been waiting on a special delivery in our classroom and it has finally arrived!!! We got our shipment of chicken eggs on Friday and we cannot wait to start our exploration. The eggs will be placed in an incubator for 21 days and we will study them and learn more about chickens as we wait for our little chicks to hatch!!!

Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment. 

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities, and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Explore books independently.
• Seek information by looking at texts, signs, and photographs in the classroom. 

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Organize and represent data with real objects. 

We love BINGO!

 

Mathematicians hard at work...

 

Writing workshop is one of our favorites...

 

We Love Dinosaurs!

Hello family and friends!

What a fun week we've had in the Aalva class! We've been focusing on two main things: exploring more about dinosaurs and working on our Shabbot boxes. We feel like our dinosaur exploration is coming to a close as we have ran out of questions this week. If the kids decide they're still interested next week, we will definitely keep rolling with it. As for our Shabbot boxes, this is something we've been working on along with Morah Devorah. The kids spent time with her making challah bread, candle holders, and challah covers. It's everything they'll need for Shabbot! There is also a piece of paper inside explaining the items and the prayers that go along with them.

To start off our week, we began paleontologist! We've been learning about different types of scientists and their jobs when dealing with dinosaurs and fossils. We decided to pull the sand table into the middle of the room and search for our own fossils. We used the same dinosaur skeletons that we worked with last week since we already knew their names and some facts about them. We covered them with sand and provided the kids with sand sifters and brushes. They spent the whole morning digging through sand and brushing off their discoveries. I've heard from several of you that this activity was talked about a lot at home. We were so happy to hear that they enjoyed it and were extending their learning outside of school too!

One question asked at the beginning of our study was, what do dinosaurs eat? We found information about this from our books (thank you to everyone who brought in dino books for us to read!). We divided dinosaurs into 2 categories: carnivores and herbivores. We spent some time going through our books and talking about each dinosaur specifically. We focused mainly on what they ate, where the probably lived, and their size. We also pulled out some magazines and cut out different pictures of meats and plants. After cutting, we divided them into categories and then glued them to posters of the different types of dinosaurs. We learned that even though the T-Rex was the biggest meat eater, the herbivore dinosaurs were actually the biggest in size! Most of them dwarfed the T-Rex and other meat eaters. We also learned that many of these dinosaurs were extremely smart and used a lot of skill when hunting for food. We learned that most of the plant eaters had to be larger in size so that they could eat leaves from the tops of trees. The kids even turned some lunches into discussions of whether they were having a carnivore or herbivore lunch day!

Another big question the kids had was, why did the dinosaurs become extinct? We spent some time talking about the word "extinct" and "theory" and what they mean. We concluded from our readings that there are several theories as to why the dinosaurs became extinct. These included asteroids, the Ice Age, volcanoes, and a flood. Ice Age was one of the main theories we read about. We talked about the idea of the Earth becoming very cold and icing over. We discussed how this would effect all types of life, even our plants, trees, and bugs. We also talked about the way these changes would affect the dinosaurs. We put some dinosaurs in ice and froze them overnight. We then let the kids use tools of their choice to excavate the dinosaurs from the ice. It was basically a wet cold mess, but they loved it! We even saw some great team work. Some kids realized that certain tools worked better than others for chopping up the ice. When they were done, they were quick to share their strategy with others who were still working. Once we got our dinosaurs out of the ice, we figured out which type they were and discussed their size and food preferences. I apologize that I didn't get many pictures of this activity. It was a little messy and crazy! I wish I had though, it was the talk of the week!

We've had a really fun time exploring dinosaurs and we've learned a lot! I hope everyone has a wonderful long weekend!

Love,
Mrs. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, and events.
• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
• Participate in group life of class.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Develop friendship with one or two preferred children.
• Express fears and concerns to familiar adult.

Language & Literacy:

• .Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
• Contribute to small group or whole class dictation activities.

Mathematics:

• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Identify the positions firth through tenth using concrete objects.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.

Making delicious challah bread...

 

 

Exploring herbivores and carnivores...

 

We are paleontologist!...

 

 

 

 

Excavating our dinosaur fossils...

 

More Dinos!

We had an exciting week in the Aalva class! Our exploration on dinosaurs is in full swing and the kids are LOVING learning about these fascinating creatures.

We started off the week off by learning more about the T-Rex. After learning about fossils and imprints everyone had questions about how scientists found footprints of dinosaurs. We learned that archeologists are the scientists that discover ancient artifacts such as dinosaur bones, fossils, and imprints. This week we were all archeologists! Using our math skills we made a replica T-Rex footprint. First we made some predictions about how big we thought the footprint might be, then we dove into the books and from our readings we found out that a tyrannosaurus’s footprint was three feet long.  Using our measuring tape we went to work! First we located on our measuring tape where the three foot mark was, next we placed the tape on piece of paper, and afterwards with the help of Ms. Rachael we drew our footprint. We then did some predicting of how many shoes we thought could fit into that one dinosaur footprint. We came to the conclusion that 25 shoes could fit in that one dinosaur footprint!

As archeologists this week we also did research on dinosaur bones and skeletons. We read a few books about how archeologists uncover these bones and how they piece them together. During center time this week we added some “dinosaur bones” in the science center and watched as the children played with the “bones” and created dinosaurs. Using toilet paper rolls they worked as a team to create their dinosaur and show it to their peers. They really seemed to enjoy this and had many questions about dinosaur bones, so as an extension we decided to extend our talk about dinosaur skeletons.  One question that someone had was, “How many bones do dinosaurs have?” Since none of our books had any information on this we decided to look to the computer. Everyone watched as we located articles and read about dinosaur bones. We discovered that a Tyrannosaurus Rex had 200 bones!

After I thought we had wrapped up our talk on skeletons I found out that some of the kids wanted to make their own skeletons. So going back to our exploration on our specific dinosaurs, we decided to let each student make a skeleton of the dinosaur they had chosen for their imprints last week. Everyone had a lot of fun learning about the bones of their dinosaur and creating their very own skeletal masterpiece! Next week we plan to focus on the extinction of dinosaurs and all the possible theories behind their extinction. We cannot wait to see where this takes us and see what the kids want to do to learn more about these theories!

 Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, and events.
• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.

Social & Emotional:

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

Language & Literacy:

• Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Contribute to small group or whole class stories, rhymes or poems

Mathematics:

• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Identify the positions firth through tenth using concrete objects.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.

 

Dino World

Hello family and friends!

We have had such a busy yet fun week. We've had a lot of really cool things happening at our school. We did our second day of recording for the training video and we were also the site for a tour done by educators from all over the state. It was a privilege to be able to participate in both of these events. The kids were happy to show off their room and favorite activities. We also celebrated Tu B'Shevat (The New Year of the Trees) with Morah Devorah! We spent time learning about these trees and sampling different foods that grow on them.

We started our week by continuing our exploration of Africa and lions. We did some research through our Zimbabwe newspapers that we started on last week. We have left these newspapers in the Art center for the kids to use throughout the year. As with all of our explorations, we want it to continue throughout the year. We love to go back and make references to things we've learned in the past. We also finished up our nonfiction books. We had some students focus solely on lions, some on Africa, and some chose to do a combination of both. As we worked we talked about the process of writing. The kids used both writing and illustrations to write their stories. They finalized them with both a front and back cover. I hope you are amazed, just as we are, as you watch their development in writing. Each one of them has come such a long way since August! You can find all of these books in the hallway. Make sure you read a few since we all wrote about different facts.

Since we felt like we exhausted their interest of lions and Africa, we have moved on to a new exploration...dinosaurs! We started this exploration off as we always do, with a KWL chart. The kids knew a lot about dinosaurs but they also came up with some pretty awesome questions. Some questions were about specific types of dinosaurs but the majority covered the species as a whole. Throughout our study we will end up touching on both the individual types as well as the species in general. I'm excited to see what we discover!

One question we had was about fossils. Using books, we were able to find out a lot of new facts about fossils. We learned that fossils were formed over a very long period of time. Throughout that length of time, the dinosaur bones actually turned into stone, which is what we know as a fossil. We also learned that fossils come in different forms. Some insects have been preserved in hard pieces of sap for thousands of years! We also learned that some fossils are actually called imprints. This is when an animal or plant leaves it's imprint in mud, which is eventually filled with sand, and finally turns hard. We decided to make our own imprints. We have a box full of realistic miniature size dinosaur skeletons. There was a wide variety of dinosaurs so we let each child pick which dinosaur interested them the most. We then made our own salt dough and pressed the skeleton into the dough, in order to make a dinosaur imprint. We then cooked the dough until it became hard (like the imprint fossils found today). Each fossil is labeled with the dinosaur name on the back.

After our fossil imprints were dry, we decided to do some research on our dinosaurs. We sat down one on one with the kids and talked about their fossil. After figuring out the name of our fossils, we looked through books to learn more about them. We let the kids search through the books to find pictures of their specific dinosaur. Once they found a page that interested them, we  read through the pages together. Our goal after reading was to have an understanding of a few interesting facts about their dinosaur. After we felt that we finished our book exploration with each child, we let them draw a picture of their dinosaur based on what they learned. The kids talked with us through their drawings, giving details about the different body parts of their dinosaur and their uses. They labeled their drawing with the dinosaur name and we asked them to share some facts they learned about their dinosaur. These are still a work in progress but when we finish we will put them in the hallway with their fossil imprints. This will allow you can see both the dinosaur and it's skeletal imprint!

We can't wait to learn more about dinosaurs in the weeks to come! I hope everyone has a fun and safe weekend!

Love,
Mrs. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Demonstrate growing initiative in selecting and carrying out activities.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
• Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.

Language & Literacy:

• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
• Combine some letters with pretend writing.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
• Creates a picture and labels it orally.
• Understand relationship between print and pictures on a page.

Mathematics:

• Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
• Compare the lengths of two objects.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical idea.

Researching Africa through newspapers...

 

 

Making dinosaur imprints...

 

 

Researching our dinosaurs and drawing them...

 

 

Celebrating Tu B'Shevat with Morah Devorah...

 

 

 We love our pattern blocks!

 

We are musicians...

 

 

 

Africa Experts

Even though this week was a short week, we still had an exciting and busy week in the Aalva class! To start off our week we had a videographer come in and actually film our class for a new ECERS 3 teacher training video. The videographer set up in our classroom and filmed our regular day. It was really exciting to watch the kids interact with him and ask him questions about his work. We all learned a lot about the process of filming from him being with us. The video did not interrupt our normal routine which was GREAT and we had a lot of fun smiling and posing for the video :)

We have still been going full speed with our exploration of Africa. I am thinking we will be wrapping up our study at the beginning of next week. This week we were given newspapers from a teacher that visited Africa over the summer. We actually got to look at newspapers from Zimbabwe!! We spent some time one morning looking at the newspapers and reading headlines. Each child was given a section of the paper to browse through and I have to say they LOVED it! They were so excited to show us what they were learning while reading the paper. After each child had time to look through their section of the paper we met in a large group and talked about what we learned. Later during center time we let students cut out parts of the paper they really like and glue it on a poster board.

We have become experts on lions and Africa over the past few weeks. As experts, we decided that we should share the information we have learned with others. We talked about the fact that scientist’s research and when they make discoveries they share that knowledge with others. That's why we know so much about the world...someone discovered it and they shared it with us! To share our facts we thought it'd be best to write a book. We started by talking through non-fiction books with each child. We discussed the different parts of a book and their function. We discussed the difference between fiction and non-fiction and why each was important. Each of our books consisted of 4 pages worth of facts. We became the author and illustrator of our individual book. We were careful to fill the pages with correct information. If we couldn't remember something we learned, we dove back into our books and searched for answers.

The process for writing our books has taken this entire week and will continue into the first part of next week. We truly believe that the PROCESS is what is important! Writing a book on the preschool level may seem like a simple process, but it is actually very complex. Children engage in all the same kinds of thinking that proficient writers engage in as they write. The process of making a book requires a writer to create something in their mind and then use writing and/or drawings to capture their ideas. First we talked with the kids individually and let them tell us facts about that they have learned while studying lions and Africa. Then we spent time with each child writing their book. We talked about what the pages should look like, what information should be added in our book, and how to organize everything. I am so impressed with how they have been coming along. The attention to detail is amazing. They really got excited about being experts and they took it seriously. They carefully wrote their words and made sure to draw pictures that matched their facts. They spent a lot of time working on their books. And that's ok! We were glad they got so involved. We'll be hanging them up in the hallway as we complete them so make sure to give them a look.

Love, Ms. Michelle

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.

Social & Emotional:

• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
• Participate in group life of class.
• Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Retell one or town events from a story read aloud.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Explore books independently.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
• use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Classify objects in their environment by color, shape, size, or function.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Sort and classify objects by one attribute

We are authors and illustrators!

 

 

 We found ice and went exploring!