We had an amazing final week in the Researcher’s class! This week we had fun activities planned to make our last week together even more memorable. We participated in a Ta-Ta Tea party where we all dressed really fancy. We wore pretty dresses, fancy hats, jewelry, and ties. We drank and ate out of real china dishes. Some of us really enjoyed the hot tea but we all loved putting the sugar cubes in our cups! We also took our final walk to the Helena House for the school year. We were glad to see our grandfriends and sing songs to them for one last time as a class. They gave all of us a special summer surprise popsicles! We then returned to the school to partake in a fun water/messy day. We painted ice spheres, ran through the sprinkler, and made chalk paint. We also participated in our own Field Day celebration where we did different relay races, played t-ball, and soccer. This week the survey person was Ms. Newton. Her question was, “Are you ready for graduation?” Most of us said that we were ready for graduation. This week we have had lots of fun making new memories as well as reminiscing of past ones. The teachers of the Researcher’s will miss these children dearly! The students have worked really hard on their performances for graduation and we hope you enjoyed it all. We would also like to thank all of the parents for their unwavering support this year we could not have done it without you! Have a great and safe summer!
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This week we continued our author study of Mo Willems. We read more of his Piggie and Elephant books. We also made many Piggie and Elephant and Pigeon crafts. We also had a new sight word book titled, "What Could I Be?". We also began discussing Venn diagrams to compare and contrast things. We went on a walk to the Sands to collect things to compare and contrast. Our survey person this week was Kaitlynn. Her question was do you like Disney or home? We counted our results and determined which number was greater. _We have had an amazing week in the Researcher’s class. We began our author study on a different author this week. We are now learning about Mo Willems. We learned that Mo Willems is famous for his pigeon books. We also learned that these are Ms. Newton’s favorite books (she even used her crazy pigeon voice when she read the books to us). In each of the pigeon books that pigeon was trying to convince someone to allow him to do something. We discussed that he was trying to persuade others. Persuade is our big word of the week. We then discussed different times that we tried to persuade our parents or teachers to allow us to do something. Our small words this week were where, does, and come. We read a book titled, “Where does it come from?” to reinforce these words daily. We will be bringing these books home to read to everyone at the end of the week. We also continued to learn about the different coins. Last week we learned a song to help us remember the value of the coins but this week we learned a song to help us remember different characteristics of each coin. Ask your child to sing our coin songs to you! This week was our first time having dance as a special! We enjoyed stretching our bodies and moving around to music. We were all very excited to participate in dance this week! Our survey person this week was Gibson Stevens. His question was which do you like snakes or barbies? We counted the results and then decided which answer Al the Alligator would eat if he was there. We would like to thank all of the parents and family members who attended Portfolio Night! We love being able to show you all of the exciting things we have learned this year. We have also began to prepare for our graduation ceremony. Next week we will continue to learn more about Mo Willems and counting money. This week we continued our author study of Kevin Henkes. We read many of his mouse books this week. We even listened to a read aloud of Kevin Henke’s books, “Chrysanthemum” and “Wimberly Worried”. After reading “Wimberly Worried” we discussed some things that we were worried about facing in kindergarten. We noticed that many of us had the same worries that Wimberly had in the story. We also listened to two interviews on Eric Carle. We learned about what inspired him to write “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. We then discussed what interview meant. We were then able to work with a partner to conduct an interview. We all reported our interview to the class. On Tuesday, Ms. Newton bought in her pet turtle Pokey. We took him outside and let him walk around. We discussed that Pokey was a cold blooded animal and how he used his shell for protection. This week we continued to review and reinforce the sight words we have learned. We have begun spelling our sight words in sign language! We also made up our own stories using some of our sight words. Now that we’ve been story detectives we know that stories have characters, a setting, and a story line. We also reviewed that the author writes the books and that illustrators draw the pictures. We had lots of fun being authors and illustrators. On Friday we did a fruit and vegetable exploration activity. Our teacher sliced different fruits and vegetables for us to observe and determine if they were fruits or vegetables. We were surprised to find out that a green pepper was a fruit! We were also shocked to find out where the seeds were in strawberries. We also worked on our number recognition and practiced writing different numbers. We have also been doing simple addition problems. Next week we will continue our author study on Kevin Henkes. Don’t forget that portfolio night is next Thursday, May 9th. We also ask that each parent bring in a baby picture of their child my the end of next week. The Researchers enjoyed celebrating Earth Day this week. On Monday Mrs. Debbie (Nolan’s mom) came in and bought different activities for us to do to celebrate Earth Day. We began our festivities with a book about how we can help to keep our storm drains clean so that the trash doesn’t travel to the ocean. We then climbed through a tunnel filled with trash and discussed how hard it was for us to get through. We then thought about how much harder it would be for animals and water to travel through tunnels filled with trash. We also played a water conservation game where we had to try to conserve water. Our favorite activity was making the sound of thunder with a cool toy that Mrs. Debbie bought in! On Tuesday we had several special guests come in to help us celebrate Earth Day. We help to clean litter off of Auntie Litter. We also helped to add beautiful things to her like flowers and animals to make her feel better. We then sang different songs about litter and Earth Day and we were even able to sang the song we learned about litter to our guests! We also had a surprise visit from “Re-run”. We had lots of fun giving him high fives! We then planted a fig tree on the playground in honor of Earth Day. This week some of our friends even found and bought in different things that coincidentally went with our Earth Day focus. Annalesa found an abandoned bird’s nest with a bird egg still inside for us to observe. Keala‘s neighbor found a baby turtle in their driveway that she bought in. She also bought in a couple of questions she had for Mr. Bender. Mr. Bender came in and answered our questions and bought us a small tank for us to keep it in until he comes to pick it up on Saturday to take to the Estuarium. Our big word this week was conserve. We discussed that conserve means to save. We discussed different things that we can save such as water and money. This week we began exploring word families. Our book this week focused on the –at word family. We did different activities to help us sort word families as well. We also read many Dr. Seuss books this week and realized that many of them had different word families in them. This week we finalized our author study of Eric Carle. We enjoyed reading his books and singing songs that went with some of them. We began reading different Kevin Henkes books this week and will continue to read different books he has written over the next week as well. This week we read “Chrysanthemum” and we decorated seed packets and wrote the letters in our names on the seeds. We then practiced spelling our names and our friends’ names with them. We even completed a greater than less than activity that went with the book to compare the amount of letters in our names with those in Chrysantehmum’s. This week’s survey person was Brick Moss. His question was, “Do you like alligators?” We discussed our results and our friend George the Giraffe came to talk to us about which of our answers Al would have eaten if he had been with us. We then drew the greater than/less than sign to show which set of answers was greater. Friday was our friend Jacob Zeller’s last day. Jacob and his family are moving to Greenville, and we will miss him dearly. We wish them the best! What a fantastic week we had! We continued our author study of Eric Carle. One of our friends noticed that all of the Eric Carle books we read had animals. We made a prediction that Eric Carle probably really likes animals! We also read the book, "Interrupting Chicken" to introduce our big word of the week, interrupt. We discussed how its not polite to interrupt when someone is speaking. Our little words this week were there, can, go, and do. We made our sight words with play dough and did flashcard games with them all week. We even practiced making up sentences using our little words. During our Eric Carle author study we read many of his books. We even did Eric Carle lacing cards and played an Eric Carle board game. We then used our "Very Hungry Caterpillar" sequence cards to put the events in the correct order. We cut out and pasted different fruits and vegetables for out caterpillars hand prints. We were able to read one Eric Carle book that didn't have animals in it. The book was called "Look Out! A Giant!". We really enjoyed this book because it had lift the flaps in it that revealed weird pictures to us. While reading "The Grouchy Ladybug" we made a connection between the time we were weeding the garden and saw what we thought were green spiders but were really aphids. We then discussed different ways ladybugs and spiders could help keep pests out of gardens. On Wednesday we visited the Alzheimer's group. We took Eric Carle books to read, sang songs for our grandfriends, and drew pictures for them. We also sang Happy Birthday to one of our grandfriends, Flo Jo! On Tuesday Mr. Bender came by to bring in a new creature from the estuary, a stone crab. We are excited to have a new creature here for us to learn about. We also visited the 1s class to see the baby chicks they have. We enjoyed petting them and hearing them peep loudly! The survey person this week was Annalesa. Her question was do you like princesses? yes or no? We then pretended that our friend Al the Alligator was here to determine which number was greater than the other. We began to learn about the -at word family. We made mini -at family books and will do many activities and read many books about the -at family next week! This week we really sprung into Spring! We have been discussing all things Spring this week. We also celebrated Keala's 5th birthday! Happy Birthday Keala! We continued our plant and Spring exploration by conducting different experiments and making different crafts. This week we finished our celery science project. We have been discussing transpiration and what it means. We learned that transpiration is when water moves upward in the stem of a plant. We cut a piece of celery in half at the bottom. We then put one half in red food coloring and the other in yellow food coloring. We each made a hypothesis as to what would happen to the food coloring and the celery as transpiration took place and drew a picture of it. When we returned after the weekend we were amazed to see that one side of the celery stalk was red while the other was yellow but the leaves were orange! We then discussed how the yellow and red food coloring mixed to make the leaves orange. Rowan was the only one whose hypothesis was correct! We then drew pictures of our results. We also embarked on another science experiment in connection to plants. We placed three beans in a ziploc bag with a wet napkin to see if they would grow. We will observe our plants using our five senses throughout the week and record data showing the growth of our beans. We also made a flower out of our snack this week. We used a stalk of celery for the stem, a Ritz cracker for the seeds, and Cheez Its for the petals. We were happy to eat our flowers all up! In honor of spring and the Easter holiday we also made many different Spring and Easter crafts. We made 3D eggs, blow paint eggs, bunny whiskers, and Easter cards. We took the Easter cards that we made to the Helena House to give to our grandfriends. While we were there we got to see the Easter bunny! It even handed out eggs to all of us. When we returned to school our teachers hid the eggs on our playground and we got to have a great egg hunt! We made flashcards for all of the sight words we have learned thus far. The flash cards were sent home on Friday for students to practice daily. This week we will send a list of different activities parents can do at home with their children to make learning sight words more fun. We also made our own books this week entitled "Foods I Like". We will read this book as a whole group, in small groups, and individually this week. On Friday the students will be able to take them home to read to family members. Please encourage your child to read daily! |
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