Happy Earth Day and half day! We did many fun Earth Day activities and learned a lot about recycling! On Monday the kids worked on a piece of writing that went along with our colorful Earth paintings. They wrote about how they could reduce, reuse, and recycle. The upper el kids made a flip book to go with their paintings. First, we colored the Earths on coffee filters and then painted them with water. Then, we did the writing work and added them to paper. On Tuesday, Mrs. Szalay took the kids to her office for game day! On Thursday we had a recycling assembly that showed us products that would break down and products that would not. We watched a video of how items are sorted once in a recycling factory. It was so cool to see how the technology separates things! As a person who loves to recycle, it was a neat opportunity to see how it's done. The kids had homework to share the benefits of recycling with 2 people. The place I live does not have recycling so I bag everything up and take plastic and glass to Target (my favorite place to shop), paper to the local school, and cardboard and Styrofoam to my mom's to recycle. So, this holiday is one of my favorites!
The rest of the week we began a unit related to the Circles Program. We will start that soon, but the first topic is learning about yourself. This has to do with personal information. We went over each child's address with them. The first graders had it down except the zip code. The kindergarteners worked on reading it with me as I wrote it out. We made houses and attached their full names and addresses as the roof. We will be adding cards next week to list who lives in our homes. This will lead into a great program that color codes people who are around us. Family, friends, and strangers. We will be asking you to send some pictures (printed on paper pics are totally fine, don't feel the need to get real copies) in a week or so. You might want to start pulling pictures of grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, family friends/neighbors you might be close with and immediate family in your home. Mrs. Reece and I will be printing pictures of strangers and community helpers. We will sort these people into categories and learn what kind of affection/talk/touch/space is or is NOT appropriate for each "circle". It's a great program that we incorporate every year. Once our kiddos are social and talking a lot to people, then we need to teach them to discriminate and listen to any "gut instinct" feelings of danger or worry about people. This will carry us into the month of May. We will even role play and practice (so we may ask you to come in to be a "stranger" for a group of kids that don't know you and ask you to help us practice--or we may ask for volunteers to work with Mrs. Reece's kids and I'd have her parents work with us).
In other areas, kindy kids continued science with living and nonliving, the letter L in handwriting, and wrote about how they take care of the Earth. We also practiced word families -en and -it!
Crazy hair day was pretty crazy! I will upload some pictures once I get them onto my email.
Also, Mrs. Kydd said the Spinal Column featuring our program and the Blue Out will be out next week so be on the look out! I hope to get a bunch of copies!! We made the Friday forum for HVS which goes out to all employees and were told it'd be on the HVS Facebook page (the pic of us with our recess buddies!). Hope you can check it out (if you use facebook).
Have a nice weekend!
The rest of the week we began a unit related to the Circles Program. We will start that soon, but the first topic is learning about yourself. This has to do with personal information. We went over each child's address with them. The first graders had it down except the zip code. The kindergarteners worked on reading it with me as I wrote it out. We made houses and attached their full names and addresses as the roof. We will be adding cards next week to list who lives in our homes. This will lead into a great program that color codes people who are around us. Family, friends, and strangers. We will be asking you to send some pictures (printed on paper pics are totally fine, don't feel the need to get real copies) in a week or so. You might want to start pulling pictures of grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, family friends/neighbors you might be close with and immediate family in your home. Mrs. Reece and I will be printing pictures of strangers and community helpers. We will sort these people into categories and learn what kind of affection/talk/touch/space is or is NOT appropriate for each "circle". It's a great program that we incorporate every year. Once our kiddos are social and talking a lot to people, then we need to teach them to discriminate and listen to any "gut instinct" feelings of danger or worry about people. This will carry us into the month of May. We will even role play and practice (so we may ask you to come in to be a "stranger" for a group of kids that don't know you and ask you to help us practice--or we may ask for volunteers to work with Mrs. Reece's kids and I'd have her parents work with us).
In other areas, kindy kids continued science with living and nonliving, the letter L in handwriting, and wrote about how they take care of the Earth. We also practiced word families -en and -it!
Crazy hair day was pretty crazy! I will upload some pictures once I get them onto my email.
Also, Mrs. Kydd said the Spinal Column featuring our program and the Blue Out will be out next week so be on the look out! I hope to get a bunch of copies!! We made the Friday forum for HVS which goes out to all employees and were told it'd be on the HVS Facebook page (the pic of us with our recess buddies!). Hope you can check it out (if you use facebook).
Have a nice weekend!