We Are Thankful!

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Tzemach class! With Thanksgiving approaching, we've been spending some time talking about the holiday and what it means to us. Of course, we are still exploring dirt and having fun with that as well! 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.

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 (in any shape they wanted). They then cut them out, and wrote a word to describe what they were thankful for. After making our leaves, we decided that we wanted to use real sticks as our tree. We were able to find a nice branch that had some real leaves and acorns still on, so we thought that one would be perfect! After we finished our leaves, we hung them on our 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 a hold puncher in our art center for them to use and explore. The kids have really been excited about this activity and have made everything by themselves! Their tree is sitting in the hallway under our bulletin board. 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 kindergarten 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! Several of the children were so proud of their book that they wanted to read them to the class. They chose to sit in the "teacher chair" and read their book to their friends. We made this completely optional for the kids so no one felt pressured. Both the readers and listeners seemed to really enjoy this time!

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.

We also had the great opportunity of visiting the 2nd grade classroom this week! On our visit, they gave us a presentation on American Indians. They have been researching 4 different tribes from South Carolina. This was a great way for us to learn about a different culture while getting to visit the elementary school. We were able to learn so much from these 4 presentations! We learned about the culture and lifestyle of each tribe, as well as their strengths and how they are similar to us. The kids were so engaged! They made comments and asked questions. We asked the 2nd graders to include us in any of their other presentations this school year, as it was enjoyed by everyone involved!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Love,
Ms. Rachael



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.

Making leaves and decorating our thankful tree...

We are authors and illustrators! Working on our thankful books...

 

 

Some of us asked to share their story with the class....

Listening to the wonderful American Indian presentations...

 

Exploring Dirt in the Woods

Hello family and friends!

It has been a fun and messy week in the Tzemach class! We've been having so much fun playing in the dirt and learning all about it. This week we spent a whole morning playing in the woods. On our adventure we were looking for different types of dirt. We dug up some samples to bring to our science center and also collected some awesome pieces of nature to enjoy in the classroom! The woods play was so much fun and the kids were in heaven. We all put on our boots and literally walked in the middle of the creek. They were pouring water and mud out of their boots and laughing about it the whole time. Some of them fell in the water and thought it was the best thing that's happened at school all year! It was a great time of watching them show compassion and building friendships as they helped one another climb up the creek banks and out of the water. Some of us even found some "sinking sand". The other kids came to his rescue with long sticks for him to hold as they pulled him out. It was sweet and hilarious! We also did some tree and vine climbing. As we walked through the different area of our woods, we had conversations about the different colors and texture of the dirt we encountered. We also made note of all the smells, sights, and sounds that we experienced. I wish I could have shown you the classroom when we got back! The kids were stripping down faster than we could stop them to put on clean clothes and were dumping water and mud from boots all over the floor. It was well worth the mess! We had a great time and we can't wait for our next woods day!

As we've been talking about different types of dirt, we decided to do a little experiment to further explore the different elements of dirt by making a sediment jar. While in the woods we dug a fairly deep hole and filled a mason jar half full with the soil sample. We then added water to the jar and covered it with a lid. We shook the jar for awhile to mix the soil with the water and then let the jar sit for the day. Throughout the day, we noticed that the soil began to settle and the water rose to the top. We discussed that as the soil settles, it divides itself into layers. We discovered that the largest sediment settled to the bottom first (these were our pebbles and rocks), followed by sand, silt, clay, and random matter or decay (such as sticks and pine needles). This has been a great way for us to get a different perspective on soil and it's many layers. The kids seemed to enjoy watching the jar throughout the day. We left magnifying glasses out near the jar to encourage the kids to document the process as they watched it. We'll be keeping this jar in our science center for awhile since the kids have enjoyed watching and documenting the process.

While we were in the woods we also collected a large amount of nature. We've made painting with nature before but we thought it would good to give the kids an opportunity to make 3D artwork with our woods findings. We dumped out everything we had gathered and put some clay out. We let the kids use their imagination and motor skills to create art. I love what they created! We made people, bugs, snowmen, magic wands, transformers, just about anything you can imagine. They took their time and got into this process. As each child worked, I walked around and asked them to tell me about their 3D artwork. I documented what they said so you can talk with them about it. These awesome pieces of work will be put on display in the hallway soon, so keep an eye out! We will also be adding pictures of our woods adventure and our dirt painting on the bulletin board with the artwork.

Aside from all our dirt fun, we had the opportunity to have some of the kindergarteners come to our class and read books to us. They have been working on writing their own fiction books so they were very proud to show them off. Our class loved it! They were engaged in the stories and thought some of them were hilarious. We love when we find opportunities to do things with other classes. It's a great way for us to learn from one another and make some new friends. We're hoping to have a few more of them come back to read to us again next week!

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.
• Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs, and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
• 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.
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
• Compare lengths of two 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.

We love the woods! And dirt!...

Story time with some of our kindergarten friends...

Setting up our sediment jar for documentation...

Working on our 3D nature artwork...