This week in Aspen it was all about the continents! Aspen has spent the week learning the names and locations of all seven continents. We also used our Geography Envelopes and Geography Cards to explore the culture of each continent! We studied animals, biomes, landforms, and people from each continent. At the same time, we learned all about where we live from largest to smallest; for example, planet, continent, country, state, city, street, house! The children also engaged in a variety of cultural follow up activities involving identifying the names and locations of the continents, countries, and states. It was so much fun learning about the world around us!
The Aspen children also had their very first library time with the very creative and amazing Ms. Lindsey! During library time, we learned how to care for books by handling them respectfully and carefully. We read the book The Children Who Loved Books by Peter Carnavas. Then we sang the song, “I Like to Read” as we danced and traveled to far away places! We learned that through books we can be transported to magical places and be anything we want! We then read Kitty Kat, Kitty Kat, Where Have You Been? as we traveled to Europe and visited Paris! Ask your child about their library experience and their French vocabulary word: gateaux! All of the Aspen children mentioned how much they love to eat gateaux!
Kindergarten students continued their geography lessons with Mr. John as they explored our world in depth and in more detail. During Readers Workshop the kindergarteners reviewed phonics and played some phonics games. We practiced our detective skills and learned that sometimes books and words will try and trick us by changing sounds in the middle or end of a word. A good Sound Detective looks at each sound in a word. In Writers Workshop the kindergarteners practiced proper letter formation and continued to create their booklets where they get to be both the author and illustrator.
Next week the thematic lesson will be trees! We will learn why trees are so important, discuss the names and the functions of each part of a tree, and will be introduced to a variety of follow-up tree themed classification activities!
