We would like to think that we are opening the door to a whole new world of discovery with Junior Kindergarten. Your children have walked right through and are exploring, discovering, and learning everyday. They are AMAZING! It is so exciting to see connections they make between home and school, the classroom and the playground, and what they learn and already know. As we worked with the HWT wood pieces last week for the first time, the children experimented with all sorts of ways to use them. Some made designs with the different shapes, fanning them out over the carpet. Others used the pieces to spell their names; and still others used them along with our classroom blocks to build elaborate structures. This week, the children will all have the chance to compose their names out of the wooden pieces. The pieces are for forming letters in uppercase. We have a print rich environment to work in in our classroom, where familiar objects are labeled with their corresponding word spelled in uppercase letters. The children are really good at recognizing their names around the classroom and can even recognize some of their friends names too! Speaking of friends, the class has really taken to our mascot friend, Chocolate! Chocolate is a Bright-Eyed Brown Bear who lives in a little tent in our Reading Nook. The children enjoy "reading" stories to him, and visiting him for hugs. They have also really taken to Mat Man, our HWT friend made out of the wood pieces. We are reading books in class about Mat Man to learn about shapes, community helpers, opposites, and rhyming. The children really enjoyed the book about shapes where Mat Man's body was made out of all different shapes from around our world. They then had the opportunity to make Mat Man using those shapes. So much fun!
Aside from our human and mat friends we have wiggly and crusty ones as well! I'm sure you have heard about our hermit crab pets Cool Dude, Sebastian, and Shelly. It was quite exciting to bring them out of their cage and let them roam about in a circle made of our classroom friends. The children are learning about how to care for them, what they like to eat, and how to safely pick them up. We have tadpoles too! The children have enjoyed observing these wiggly, jiggly, friends in their special tank. We took a walk to the bridge on campus that the tadpoles were born under, read a book about where they come from, and we will learn more with the aid of video and observation this week. The children will be given their own science journals to record the information with pictures and drawings! :)
There has already been so much to learn and there is still so much to come! We are having wonderful days together. I hope your child is enjoying everything even just half as much as Mrs. Cummings and I are! The Bright-Eyed Bears are a blast!!!
