This week, we learned all about Asia! We learned that in Japan, baseball is becoming a popular sport! We also learned that in India children often take automated rickshaws to school, which is a very small car, almost like a golf cart. We also learned that in China, they make rice cakes called nian-gao! We also visited some of the countries we are representing using Google Earth!
This week our class has been working so hard on their class project, their festival lines, and their songs!! Keep up the practicing at home parents!☺ We are also getting very exciting about our baby ducks! We are on day 28… so any day now!!
Take A Peek Into Next Week:
Next week we are getting ready for our international festival!!
Next Wednesday is our festival dress rehearsal. Your child does not need to wear their costume for this. Friday is the big night!! Please remember that next Friday is an early release day. Your child must be picked up at 12. Also, be at Cuyahoga falls high school at 5pm!!
Africa: Is one of the seven continents in the world that has more than 50 countries. Cairo located in Egypt is Africa’s largest city. Africans can work on farms to grow corn, rice and other crops. Africa has the largest desert in the world known as the Sahara. It also has grassy places called savannas and rain-forest. Africa is known for all its wild animals such as: gorillas, zebras, giraffes and lions.
Europe: Is one of the seven continents in the world. It is very small but has many countries like Germany, Spain and Italy. Each country in Europe has its own language, food and customs. For example people in Germany speak German and celebrate a festival called Oktoberfest. Europe also is known for its groups of mountains called ranges. The tallest mountain range in Europe is the Alps.
Work Time
Guest Reader
Reminders
International Festival Rehearsal | April 18th 6pm-7pm
International Festival Show | April 20th 5:30pm-8:30pm
Early Dismissal | April 20th at noon
A peak into next week: Australia, Antarctica and Asia
Water Molecules on the Move: We filled two glasses with the same amount of water: one cold and one hot. Then, we put one drop of food coloring into both glasses at the same time. The students observed that the food coloring traveled quicker through the hot water than the cold water. We discussed how molecules move faster through hot water which is why the food coloring spread faster.
Traveling Water: We taped a piece of string inside one glass then filled it with water. After that we placed the loose string in the empty glass, pouring the full glass of water over the string. When we poured the water it traveled along the string making its way into the empty glass. We talked about how a drop of water has many molecules that are held together by electrical, molecular bonds. We learned that these strong hydrogen bonds found in water are what allowed the water molecules to stick together very well as the water traveled down the string and into the empty glass.
Vowels and consonants: The students learned to recognize and distinguish vowels from consonants, which is an important step in the development of reading and writing skills. We talked about how all words contain at least one vowel. The students were quickly able to recognize the vowels, which is great because they will have a strong foundation for learning rules and spelling patterns for short and long vowels, final vowels, unaccented vowels, silent vowels and irregular spellings.
We are starting to practice for The International Festival. We are learning our individual lines and learning the songs to be sung at the International Festival. The children are having a good time practicing.
Peek in the Classroom:
The University Of Akron Field Students are working with their “Roo Buddy” This week they are working with letter sounds and the concept of “Land, Air, and Water”.
This student is working on a construction box which falls into the category of Geometry. This student made shapes such as a hexagon, chevron, trapezoid, parallelogram, and isosceles triangle.
Upcoming Events:
International Festival Dates-
Take your child to the restroom before dropping them off (even if they say they do not have to go)
International Festival Practice – Wednesday 4/18/2018 – 6:00 to 7:30 pm
International Festival – Friday 4/20/18 – 5:30 to 8:30 pm
Friday 4/20/2018 **** Early Dismissal at Noon — No Aftercare ****
Moms and Muffins – Friday May 11th – 7:00 to 7:45 am
This last week we read a poem about a storm. We listened for rhyming words through out the poem and practiced reading the purple highlited words. We discussed if we have ever seen a big storm like the speaker did in the poem. They talked about where they would like to be when their was a storm. They said they woukd like to be inside with their parents. The kindergartners created their own poem, and drew pictures of one of the types of stroms mentioned in the poem.
After Spring Break
-The students will be starting the next series in the Junior Great Books series. There will be different assignments and the format will look different. I will send out more information after spring break.
We will be learning about the parts of speech until the end of the year. We the learned there are three articles. They are A, An, The and we learned rules when we use those articles. “A” goes with consonants, “an” go with vowels, and “the” goes with both consonants and vowels. Moving along we leaned that a pronoun takes the place of a noun and pronouns sometimes make our lives easier. We went over six pronouns He(boy), she(girl), we( a group we are included), they( a group we are not included), it(we use for non-living things and when we don’t know what gender). We never call a human an “it” because it is rude. “You” was the last pronoun we became familiar with.
Cultural Subjects:
We can now count to ten in 27 different languages (English, Sign Language, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic with the Lebanese Dialect, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Tagolog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh, Dutch/Flemmish, Polish, Serbo-Croation, Cebuano, Malay, Hindi, Farsi, and Turkish).
Next week:
Line Time: Pronouns
Sight Words of the Week: No words during International Festival Practices
Synonym of the Week: No words during International Festival Practices
Construction Boxes: The students used the constructive triangles in these boxes to learn that all plane geometric figures can be constructed from triangles. They worked with two different rectangular boxes, a triangle box, and a large and a small hexagon box. Each box they used contained triangles of different sizes, shapes, and colors. They used the boxes to explore and set a foundation for later concepts such as equivalency, similarity, and congruency.