Gingerbread People

This week and last week we have been reading lots of stories about the gingerbread man. We have practiced retelling the stories, as well as comparing and contrasting different gingerbread stories - The Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Girl, The Gingerbread Baby, The Gingerbread Bear, The Ninjabread Man, The Gingerbread Pirates, Gingerbread Friends, The Gingerbread Man Loose at the School, Firehouse, and Zoo! Make sure to check out some of these stories on YouTube or at the library. Your children know them well. 😊

We made gingerbread people this week and created our own gingerbread stories. Make sure to ask your child about the story of his or her gingerbread person!

Wishing you and all your families Happy Holidays! See you in 2020!

Engineering Design

This week we have been busy with our Engineering Design challenge - building a shade structure for our friend, Mr. Bear. We used the Engineering Design process to help us brainstorm ideas, make decisions and plan, create prototypes, test our prototypes, and redesign accordingly. The kids loved this project and learned a lot about sun and shade while doing it!

Make sure to ask your child about this fun project!

Super Powers, Science, Spiderman...a Busy Week!

Wow! This week has been very busy and also very exciting! We started a new reading unit called, Reading Super Powers. The kids are learning what "powers" they have that can help them read on their own. The first "power" we learned about is Pointer Power. We learned how good readers point under each word while they read, and they make their fingers hop to each word as they read. We used special witch fingers to help us practice Pointer Power as we read poems and songs that we already know.

Today was the most exciting day of all as readers, because we returned to our classroom from lunch recess and found evidence that Spiderman himself had made a visit to our classroom while we were outside for recess. 

Dr. Cicotte even caught a glimpse of Spiderman and tried to stop him to ask what he was doing, but he coudn't catch him! 

Spiderman even left us special Power Pointers to help us make our Pointer Power even stronger!

In science this week, we learned about the Engineering Design Cycle. 

To practice the Engineering Design Process, the students were presented with a problem in which a little bear lived outside and was getting so hot because he didn't have any shelter or a forest nearby. Students worked with a partner to complete steps 1 through 4 of the engineering design cycle and decided to create shade structure prototypes for Mr. Bear. Next week, we will test our shade structures and redesign as necessary. This has been an awesome project for us!

To help us build our prototypes, we made some shadow observations outside. We went outside three times throughout the day and traced a partner's shadow. We observed how their shadows changed throughout the day. They were pretty excited to watch the shadows change!

During our library time this week, your children had the opportunity to explore robotics and practice coding with tablets. As you can imagine, this was a very popular activity!

 

Wow! We had a fantastic week in kindergarten! Looking forward to another fun week next week!