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!

Our Journey to Africa

Hello family and friends!

It's been great to finally get back in the swing of things this week. I have a lot to catch you up on (I'll try not to write a novel)! As you know, we started out voting on a new exploration and came to the conclusion that we wanted to learn about lions. We spent the beginning of last week doing tons of research. We started our KWL chart and began researching through books and online. We realized quickly that we knew a lot more than we thought about lions. We ended up knowing more facts than we had questions. As we read, one of the main facts we kept reading was that lions are found in Africa. This got us talking about Africa and somewhere along the way our whole momentum shifted. We left the curiosity of lions and devoted our time to Africa. I think it's great for the kids to see that we aren't stuck to a "topic". We are here to explore and discover our interests. We can learn what we want, when we want to learn it.

The first thing we did to explore Africa was finding it on a map. The distance between two places on a map is difficult for anyone to grasp but the main lesson we wanted the kids to learn was that the world is round (we compared the difference in a flat map and globe), that we lived very far from Africa (we would have to fly about 18 hours or ride a boat across the Atlantic Ocean), and that Africa was on a different continent. We discussed that a continent is made up of many different countries. After discussing these things in a large group, we put stickers on our globes and let the kids explore them independently. We asked a lot of questions about continents, countries, and oceans.

We thought a great place to start in our exploration was talking to an expert. Mrs. UD, one of our infant teachers, is from Nigeria so we asked her to come in and speak to us. We learned so much from her! We wrote a welcome message to her on our board and welcomed her with plenty of hugs. She talked to us about traditional foods, music, celebrations, dress, and weather in Africa. She reminded us that people in Africa live the same as we do. They live in cities with homes and families. We spent a lot of time discussing similarities and differences. We learned that Africa only have two seasons: dry and wet. During these times there is either a lot of sun or a lot of rain. We also learned that some countries in Africa have large jungles where many different animals live (including lions). Sadly, we also learned that as more cities grow, more trees and jungles are taken away, and this can harm the wildlife there. She was patient with us as we asked many questions and even brought in pictures for us to see. Thank you, Mrs. UD for sharing your beautiful culture with us!!

Our meeting with Mrs. UD lead us through our exploration the rest of the week. We spent one day focusing only on traditional African music (which we learned has a heavy emphasis on drums). We listened quietly to music then we spent some time dancing to it. We also spent time playing an African djembe along with the music we heard. We left the djembe out for the kids to explore independently. It was an awesome day! We talked about what this drum was made of and how it was used. We learned that if we hit different parts of the drum, it made different sounds. We made a lot of noise and had a lot of fun doing it!

We also spent some time this week talking about resource that we get from Africa. We learned that Africa produces a large amount of salt and cocoa beans. We let the kids explore these recources in any way they chose using tweezers, mirrors, magnifying glasses, our hands, our noses, and our tongues! Some used the tweezers to chop the cocoa beans up and others broke them with their hands. We learned that cocoa beans are really good for us and high in antioxidants. We also learned that cocoa beans can be ground up into a powder and used to make chocolate! We tasted both the salt and the beans. We also discussed the feel and smell and uses of these materials in our every day lives.

We've already learned a lot about Africa and I'm excited to see where our exploration takes us next week. The kids still seem interested and are asking more questions, so we'll continue this exploration until they feel it's time to move on.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Love,
Mrs. Rachael


Approaches To Learning:

• 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 delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.

Social & Emotional:

• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders. 
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
• Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
• Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry.
• 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.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.
• Contribute to small group or whole group class dictation activities. 

Mathematics:

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning. 
• Investigate solutions to simple problems. 
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment. 
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Organize and represent data with real objects.

Mrs. UD speaking to us about Africa...

 

 

Enjoying our time with the djembe...

 

Exploring salt and cocoa beans...

 



 

We are engineers...

We are artist!





 



Chanukah Celebration Week

Hello family and friends,

What a busy Chanukah week we have had in the Aalva class. Last week we made our menorahs out of clay and this week we were able to paint them since they dried over the weekend. I was so impressed by their attention to detail and how much time they spent painting their menorahs. As we painted we talked more about the characteristics of menorahs and what some of our menorahs at home looked like.

This week during Torah time with Morah Devorah we made latkes!! 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. The kids really enjoyed adding the ingredients and following the directions as we read the recipe. After we added all the ingredients and stirred the mixture, we took the uncooked latkes to the kitchen for some volunteer parents from the elementary school to cook. Our final result was absolutely delicious!! We really enjoyed eating our latkes for snack.

Another fun thing we did this week was continuing to add Chanukah decorations to our classroom. Monday morning we brought out our classroom menorah. Every morning we have added a candle to our menorah and said the blessings as a class! Last week we put up the sun catchers, Chanukah banner, and Jewish flag. This week we decided to make dreidels and hang them from the ceiling!  As we decorated our dreidels we concluded that since they would be hanging it would be best to decorate both sides so that it could be seen from all directions. Everyone was SO excited to watch us hang their dreidels in the classroom. One day as the air conditioning came on, one student noticed that our dreidels were spinning! Everyone talked in amazement about how the dreidels spun just like they do when you played the game. It was a great way to talk to them about the wind blowing and how even though we cannot see wind we can see it move objects and we can feel it when the air blows around us.

The most exciting thing this week was definitely our Chanukah play, put on by all the Morahs. We practiced every day this week and I truly believe they did a great job today! I am so proud of all of their hard work. We even got to sit down and watch the entire school play and they did a magnificent job staying in their seats and showing respect to all the other classes by watching their performances. I hope you enjoyed seeing their performance. If you didn’t get to see it I have placed some pictures at the bottom. It was a little hard to get a good picture since the lights were off but I think they still turned out great.

Have a great weekend. Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

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.
• 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:

• 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.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• 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.



 

Let's Celebrate Chanukah!

Hello family and friends!

We had a great week back from Thanksgiving break! The kids had so many stories to tell us about family and friends and food. As we say good bye to Thanksgiving, we shift our attention to Chanukah. This will be the focus of our classroom over the next couple of weeks. The kids have been asking questions about Chanukah and are ready to dive into it!

 As we focus on Chanukah, we've added several new elements to our classroom. In science, we have added a Chanukah exploration bag. In this bag we have put dreidels (and chips to play the game with), candles, and our classroom menorah. We've also added Chanukah books to our classroom library. We've even done some decorating! You'll find a Chanukah sign hanging up in our room and next week we will be making some of our own decorations to hang from the ceiling. The kids have been beyond excited about learning more about the holiday! We've been doing a lot of reading about the holiday and its history both in our large group setting and with Morah Devorah.

To start off our week, we introduced the kids to dreidels. We've been practicing our spinning and we're getting better by the day. We also introduced them to the game you play with dreidels. This was a fantastic way for us to focus on math as the game involves both added and taking away. While we were learning new math concepts and working with numbers, we were also learning Hebrew letters and playing the game we read about in our Chanukah books. It was a great day of making connections and focusing on our new math skills. We have a large collection of dreidels in our classroom, as well as directions of how to play the game. If you’d like to borrow any of this to play with at home, please let us know. We’d love for you and your child to play at home as well!

 As we’ve been discussing Chanukah, we’ve been putting a heavy focus on Jewish culture. We’ve been learning about the history of Chanukah and the Maccabee's as well as traditions of Jewish families. You’ll notice that we have hung the Jewish flag up in our classroom as well as made sun catchers to place in our windows. These sun catchers have the same symbol and colors as our Jewish flag. The kids used popsicle sticks to make these. They shaped and glued their sticks and then glued tissue paper on the back for light to shine through. As light is an important aspect of Chanukah, these sun catchers are a great reminder of the power and beauty of light. On a sunny day, these look beautiful in our windows! We hope it shows everyone who enters our classroom the value we place on the Jewish culture of our school. While we originally made these as part of our Chanukah decorations, we all decided that these should hang around well past Chanukah! And our flag is now permanent in our classroom…yay!

While we do have a classroom menorah that we will be using with candles next week, we thought it’d also be a good idea for the kids to make a menorah to use at home. We hope that what we model with our classroom menorah can be something the kids demonstrate with their own menorah at home. We used clay to shape our menorahs and poked holes in them for our candles. As we made these we spoke about the menorah, the different characteristics of it and how it is used. After these dry we will be painting them and letting the kids take them home. We were hoping to send them home Friday but it looks like we will have to wait until Monday as they are super thick and still wet. Each menorah will be sent home with a shamash candle (used to light all the other candles, the "helper" candle) for the children to light throughout the week. Make sure you give us feedback about how this goes at home! We can’t wait to hear how they apply what they’ve been learning.

Next week we will continue our learning of Chanukah and plan on doing some cooking. If any of you know how to make a traditional Jewish dish and want to come cook with us, we would love to have you teach us! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Love, Ms. Rachael

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.
• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Represent simply tow-dimensional geometric shapes.
• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Count orally forward to twenty and backward from three.

 

 

Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel...

 

 

We love our sun catchers!...

 

 

Working hard on making our menorahs...

 

 

How many 4 year olds can we fit into the sandbox?!...

 

 

"This is Hashem in the sky. He sent down a lot of rain and Jonah got swallowed by a whale. See him in the whale's stomach?"