Hello, Bluebird Families!
Our first three days in kindergarten were wonderful! We enjoyed getting to know each other, our class routines, and our school. We read some sweet books together, like Your Name is a Song and That’s What Friends Are For. (Ask your children about what happened to the elephant who hurt his leg in the jungle.) We sang, danced, and marched to some fun music by The Laurie Berkner Band. We ate our snacks and lunches outside at the picnic shelter. We went nature collecting and gathered some beautiful purple flowers for our kitchen table and rocks of all shapes and sizes for our nature table. We listened to The Complete Collection of Frog and Toad Stories by Arnold Lobel during our rest times this week, while we quietly looked at books, played with a small bin of toys, or rested our bodies on our Bluebird towels. None of the children slept, which is completely fine with me. I just want them to have a bit of quiet time to themselves to relax and reset for the afternoon. We discovered our individual boxes of art supplies and tested them out by drawing, cutting, and glueing to our hearts’ content. We built train tracks and block towers and Lego creations. I heard engineer vocabulary being used, like axle, ramp, and foundation. We cooked and served a wide variety of delicious food in our class kitchen area. Outside we loved playing in the sandbox, making mud pies, swooshing down the slides, pulling stuff around in the wagon, kicking and tossing soccer balls, discovering fossils and seashells, playing Duck, Duck, Goose, and rolling down the big hill. We played some learning games to match letters and sounds, to put letters in ABC order, to match words and pictures, to match numbers and items, to count to 100, to make patterns, and to write our names. We also played Zingo, a great word learning game, and Zoominoes, which is like dominoes, but uses pictures of zoo animals instead of dots. We had calendar time every day to review days of the week and months of the year and discuss what day and date yesterday was, today is, and tomorrow will be. This week, we will continue playing and learning simultaneously. I will also be doing some playful, low key evaluations with each child to see what they already know, so I can determine how to guide their learning this year. Your children are amazing, smart, fun, creative, and kind! They are getting along well, and I am loving having them in class!
A few reminders:
1. Please be on time to pick your child up from school at 3:00 PM. I need to leave the Children’s Garden by 3:05 PM at the latest to drive across town to pick up my children from their school at 3:15 PM.
2. If you have not sent in 2 (4×6) printed photos: 1 of your child and 1 of your child with their family, please do so as soon as possible. I plan to do an activity with these as soon as every student has theirs at school.
Thank you for sharing your children with me!
Anna
