Through the cold days of February and March, we stayed warm and busy inside our Room #17 Kindergarten classroom. The photos that follow tell the story of our journey through the end of Winter 2011.
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You’ll note a brief explanation, at the end of the photos, of math principles of number we’ve been modeling through Math Workshop and through the Math Baskets. There are three aspects of number that young children acquire. Let’s use the example of five/5:
1) Quantitative: this means that a child begins to recognize the visual quantity of 5: * * * * * whether that quantity is dots on dice or a sequence of unifix cubes..visualization(seeing a picture in your head) is very important here
2) Verbal: this means the child is able to say the word “five” when they see that quantity visually or the symbol 5
3) Symbolic: this means that the child understands that the symbol 5 is the same as the quantity * * * * *

All of these aspects of number work together to help your child grow in his/her understanding of number.

There is an excellent website which would help your child with these concepts of number:
http://www.fi.uu.nl/rekenweb/en/
Click on age 6 or 7.
Click on Speedy Pictures. (You can change the speed time to faster or slower.)
Have fun exploring these opportunities with your child!

We have had a thrilling December and January in Room 17 at PVS! We began December with our Gingerbread Study and discovered 14 books in the library with several different gingerbread characters. We made gingerbread cookies and houses and have just finished placing photos and drawings of our study in the hallway. Please feel free to drop by our classroom to see what we’ve been up to! 

The photos below tell the story of our activities during the past two months, including pictures from our most recent Grant Nature field trip!

This past week we worked each day with Mr. Chris Rowlands, our very gifted musical and visual artist in residency, and Green Team first grade classrooms to write a song about growing things and how we take care of them. We will be practicing the song and then recording it in preparation for a performance at the CHS/PAC on the evening of Thursday, February 24th for our PVS families. Please save the date on your calendar!

On Monday, February 14th, we’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day in our school by having a sing-along at 9 and 1 pm, and parties at 9:30 and 1:30. In our classroom all the children will be exchanging Valentines. I will send home a list of names of friends in the classroom this Friday so that your child can prepare his/her Valentines at home. We will be creating Valentine Bags for collecting our messages from friends at school.

Many, many thanks to our room mothers, Mrs. Weller in the AM and Mrs. Kilbane in the PM, and all the parents who donated and helped for our Winter Party. We had such a great time that we only had time to take a few pictures!

We have returned to our water study and have performed several science experiments including: watching a drop of blue food coloring enter both hot and cold water, freezing a banana to see if it has water in it, holding an ice cube in our hands and watching it melt, and wondering how the water disappeared from our pants after the ice melted. We used a great big work, “evaporation”, to describe that process of water turning into a gas. As we continue our water study, we’ll be talking about all the living things that are made of and need water. We are planning on planting a Late Winter/Early Spring container garden with our Green Team friends in the courtyard of our school. We hope to harvest the vegetables we plant and cook with them in late April, early May.

The days are beginning to get a little longer and it is light earlier in the morning and later in the evening! How exciting it has been for us to track the seasons both at Grant Nature and around our school.

We continue to be grateful for all of your support for our classroom! Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day with your dear families!
Karen

Although it seems as if we have just started November, we are already headed toward December in Kindergarten! During this month we have been collecting stories, and reading them again and again to add to our browsing boxes with Owl Babies: Stone Soup, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Deep in the Forest, Pancakes for Breakfast, Mud Pony, and Chrysanthemum. After the first of the year we’ll be using these stories for our Reader’s Workshop.

We prepared for our second journey to Grant Nature Nook by reading books about the woods and enjoyed a very special book about the creatures who plant trees…and most of them were not humans! We’ll be revisiting this book in the Spring as our kindergarten friends have decided we also need to plant trees at Grant Nature. Thank you once again to all who volunteered to be Nature Parents and accompanied us on our second visit to see the changes in the meadow, the woods, and the creek. When we go at the end of January we’re hoping to have snow! We’re wondering how many other changes we’ll notice?

We had a wonderful celebration with Mr. John DeBoer as we enjoyed his Native American flute music on January 8th. Please view the videos on the right of this webpage, so you can hear the animals he creates with his instruments! We used our Pick Sticks, with each kindergartener pictured and named on a cardboard stick, so that we could graph our votes on which flute we preferred. When students voted, with the helper asking each friend using a complete sentence, and each student responding with a complete sentence: “Which flute did you like best?”, students in the morning and afternoon classes all preferred the hummingbird over the bear flute. We ask math questions while graphing, “Which choice has more or less sticks?”

We’ve been playing the “Name Game” at the end of most days, as our word work, and have almost made it through all the friends’ names! I supply the blanks and empty circles while students look at the chart of friends’ names at the front of the room and decide how many blanks are written on the white board and which letters to guess based on the number of blanks. Our name game is often called “Hangman” but we play it with blanks _ _ _ _ and empty circles 0 0 0 0 0 which we fill with letter guesses that are not in the planned name. I apologize if this explanation is confusing…please ask your child how to play the name game if you’re not sure! I have seen several friends borrowing white boards to play it with each other after book club during Discovery Stations.

After we return from Thanksgiving, we will begin our Gingerbread Investigation! We’ll follow up on Mr. Suter’s Gingerbread Baby game which the children played in gym on the Monday before Thanksgiving. We’ll be reading several different versions of Gingerbread stories, voting on our favorites, and making our own gingerbread and baking it into cookies. Then we’ll follow our gingerbread people around the world as they stop on each of the continents to celebrate a variety of holidays!

Our Winter Party will take place on the last day of school before Winter Break, December 17th! Thank you again to our room mothers for planning our parties!

Happy Holidays to each one of you as you celebrate with your dear families and precious kindergarteners! Thank you again for all of your support at home of your kindergarteners’ learning!
Karen

October was a very exciting month in our Kindergarten class in Room 17! In addition to the literacy, math, science and social studies routines, we talked about our late summer field trip at the end of September, practiced for our Green Team Musical, enjoyed a Halloween party, and celebrated several birthdays! We added two poems to our Poetry folders and our wall, “Sunset” and “Put a Poem in Your Pocket”, and we now have 11 WINK words near the ceiling: the, I, am, and, a, is, we, in, up, no, & on (the last 2 we're adding in November!). We also began making books in our Writer’s Workshop and have all decorated our conferencing books. Students prepared their portfolios for parent-teacher conferences and are grateful for the special note from their families written following their conference. We have had several math games in our math baskets and are learning to take turns while gaining number sense, writing numerals, practicing graphing, and counting forwards and backwards. 

 We have enjoyed many new books and continue to revisit several old favorites which we’ll place in our browsing boxes soon, in preparation for Reader’s Workshop.

We are very grateful for the fun Halloween party our room mothers, Mrs. Weller for the morning, and Mrs. Kilbane for the afternoon, planned for us! We were delighted to have so many moms and dads helping and attending! Many, many thanks for all the materials for crafts, food, planning, and time invested in such a lovely party for all our Kindergarten friends. We wouldn’t have had so much fun without your help!

Please enjoy the photos and videos added this month by clicking on the photo or video you wish to see! 

I am grateful each day for the joy of working with your children!
Karen

Room 17 has been bustling with excitement over new friends, new teachers, new books, new experiences, and lots of new learning!

What a great time we had at Curriculum Night as we walked through a typical Kindergarten day in Room 17! Parents also signed up for Parent-Teacher conferences on Wednesday, November 10th and Thursday, November 11th all day both days between 7:30 am and 8:20 pm. If you were unable to attend the Curriculum evening and have not yet signed up for a conference, could you please email: Karen.davidson@centerville.k12.oh.us or call my cell at 654-8566 so we can schedule an appointment for Nov.10th or 11th to talk about your child’s progress in Kindergarten at the end of the first quarter.

At Curriculum Night we passed out two very important papers that I hope have not gotten lost in the shuffle of so many papers in your child’s folder! Mrs. Marshall (our librarian) sent a paper asking parents to commit to caring for the books that children bring home from the school library, and asked for your signature. When your child returns that paper he/she can begin to take home books from the school library. We have library on Thursdays, so your child can return books on those days or any day during Open Circulation in the am or pm. If your child does not bring back his/her book, he/she will not be able to take out another book.

We also had a field trip slip for the Grant Nature Nook which we’re going to as a class next Thursday, September 30th. PLEASE return this slip as soon as possible so your child can go with us! We would love to have some moms who are willing to be trained as “Nature Moms” to go with us. Training is being provided by Kathy Paice, one of our Naturalists, at the Nature Nook this Wednesday, 9/22, 9-10 am and next Tuesday, 9/28, 1-2 pm. If you are interested email or call me and/or email Kathy: Kathy.paice@centerville.k12.oh.us. Please note that a field trip permission slip is attached, in PDF form, at the bottom right hand corner of this web page for your convenience! Just download, print and sign so you can send it in with your child if you haven't yet had a chance to!

You may hear your child singing some songs about recycling because we are preparing for our Green Team musical on TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 26TH AT 7 PM AT THE PERFORMING ARTS CENTER (PAC) AT CENTERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL (CHS) SO PLEASE SAVE THE DATE AND PLAN TO ATTEND! All of the children will be singing and moving to the beat of some exciting songs that are on this website in the upper right hand corner. You can play the songs and listen to your child prepare for our musical!

We are studying, asking questions and talking about water alot! We would love to have samples of water from lakes, creeks, rivers, and streams nearby. Some friends brought water in a small container from journeys to lakes over the Labor Day weekend. If you can find some local water with your child and want to send it in a plastic container with a tight lid, that would be great!

Please know that I delight in talking with you about your child and am happy to receive emails or calls about any questions you might have about your child’s day at school. We are growing as a learning community and I am discovering new things each day about each one of your beautiful kindergarteners.

Thank you for the privilege of teaching your children each day!
Karen

TO ACCESS THESE PHOTOS, PLEASE CLICK ON THE FIRST ONE THEN USE THE DIRECTION ARROWS TO CONTINUE SCROLLING THROUGH THE EXCITING EXPLORATIONS YOUR CHILD HAS EXPERIENCED!

I am so looking forward to meeting each and everyone of my new students and their families this evening, August 23rd during Open House at Primary Village South!

We will have a word-finding hunt tonight and you will discover your principal's name, our science project topic for the year, some crawling and flying creatures we plan to raise, and the name of our pet aquatic frog!

At the same time you'll have a chance to look for clues so you can answer these questions in the school office, the bathrooms, on the playground, and in the green neighborhood space.

Every family will also have their picture taken and will have an opportunity to draw a family face for our display wall as we prepare for Curriculum Night in September!

If you need to contact me about concerns or questions throughout our school year, please don't hesitate to call my cell phone: 937-654-8566 or email me at karen.davidson@centerville.k12.oh.us .

(Click on the photos below to get  a few clues in preparation for the word hunt tonight.......see you then!)

Karen Davidson