Goodbye, January!

Hello Artistic Scientists' families!

We have successfully come to an end of the first month together of the new year!  It's been fun!

We have been continuing our exploration of vowels and have been enjoying it with a new game in our class.  We have taken our game, "Change the Vowel," (if your child has not asked you to play Change the Vowel at home yet, you might ask them how to play!)  to the next step and are using letter cards to make new words by changing the vowels, but keeping the consonants the same!  Check out some of the words we found and the others that made us laugh!

Reading and writing are skills that many of our friends are still practicing.  I put together a few puzzles for the students to use to unscramble a sentence!  Each word of the sentence is it's own puzzle piece and the student works towards putting each piece in the right order.  Some friends used their vast knowledge of how to do a puzzle and were able to check their work by looking at the envelope that the puzzle came in.  Other friends used their knowledge of sentence structure and checked which the first piece was by finding the Upper Case letter, and which piece was last by finding the period to end the sentence with!  Lastly, sounding out and reading the sentence to make sure it was clear was another way students checked their work.

If you ever have a moment to pop in, please take a moment to check out our Information Table by the door. I have placed a small activity for you to do with your child called, "What's the Story?"  Here is the picture that friends have been looking at and coming up with a small description of what they believe is happening in the picture.  Here are some responses:

What's the Story?

Nyala:  I think the kitten named Sassy is tickling Joey the Gorilla's belly.

Ashley:  The gorilla's laughing cuz the kitty is tickling him.

Mikayla:  The gorilla is laughing cuz the kitty is crawling on his tummy.

Lyla:  THe kitty scratched the gorilla's tummy or he's either laughing with the kitty.

Lainey:  The kitty scratched him because the gorilla trapped him.

Avani:  A cat is biting the gorilla's arm.  He's yelling, "OW!"  Who would let a cat in a cage with that gorilla?

Jake:  The monkey wants to eat the cat.

Kai:  The monkey is holding the cat.  They're hugging.

Fiona:  The gorilla is snuggling the cat.  They live on the farm.

I will be putting out new pictures periodically, so check in when you can!

Our 8th Grade Buddies taught us a new game called, "Mine Field."  Every student was asked to help each other create a clear pathway from one end of the "mine field" to another, by placing a "step" in front of their partner.  This increased the length of the trail to the end!  But careful not to throw your "step" too far, because if someone doesn't make it, they land on the mine field!  Our Buddies helped guide along the trail to safety.

Love, Gaby

Who Are We?

Hello Kindergarten families!

Since coming back from our Winter Break, we have been working on our characters who attended the party in our Spooky Story that we wrote on Halloween.  After identifying them all, we were noticing that we still didn't know WHO was at the party... so the class decided to give more information about their character.  We are bringing our characters to life!  

This is an interesting concept for many of the friends; we have established some key points that each child will share about their character:

• Give your character a name
• Describe their appearance (what they look like, what their costume is)
• Describe their favorite things
• Explain who their friends are
• Explain where they live

Each student will be working on giving their character their own identity, which got us thinking about who we are... WHO ARE WE?  We started making lists of words that describe who we are, what we do in class, and any thing else that would help give people more information about us. 

But our list was so long, we started eliminating words that not everyone agreed with, and started voting for the words that we wished for the most.

After every vote, we had fewer and fewer words to chose from...

Until we finally came down to the final words--- still eliminating those that students felt were not necessary to have because people already knew we were kindergartners  humans, school people, loving, and playful.  We wanted to give people information about us that they did not already know.

After looking at the results, we combined the two most wished for words and did one last vote to see what our official class name would be!  From now on, you'll be hearing me call out to the kids by their name:  Artistic Scientists!  Very appropriate, if you ask me.

In other news, we have been practicing our number sense by coming up with ideas about what there is only ONE of in our life.  Here are a few examples of student work:

"sun"

"stomach"

"Planned Possibilities Binder"

"moon"

"sky"

"sun"

"mouth"

Friends have also been asked to think about letters and what words start with a specific letter.  We are starting off with the letter A and it is neat to see what some friends have come up with by looking through different dictionaries and other sources in our class!

"armadillo"

"Avani"

"Andrew"

Also, last week, our friend Lyla brought in a beautiful Origami crane to our Morning Meeting.  We got a chance to examine the fine folding techniques used and it inspired us to do some more research.  I happen to have a couple of books on Origami in our Art Book section, and we investigated the different creations that one could make out of paper. 

In our afternoon, we watched a "How To..." video, demonstrating how to make and Origami Boat.  We worked in small groups and tried to follow the steps on the video.  Check it out if you'd like to do one together at home!

I'm bummed that I did not take pictures of this moment that we were sharing together, because I was really impressed at how some friends were stepping up to the plate and taking risks, as well as sharing their expertise with friends who felt like they were struggling.  I heard a lot of, "That's ok, we're just practicing right now..."  It was a very proud moment... 

So thank you again for sharing these wonderful children with me.  It is really a lovely experience we are having together...

Love, Gaby

All School Assembly "Sing Along"

Good evening!

Steve has provided me with the video from our All School Assembly "Sing Along"!  If you'd like to check out our performance, please note the START and END time.



(Start: 2:49 - End: 10:50)

Love, Gaby