Cuyahoga Falls School

February we started off studying Internal Organs.  We learned the brain is the control center of your body that sends and receives.  Our lungs help us breathe, the heart pumps our blood and the stomach begins to digest our food with acid.  The small intestines digest the food and send nutrients to the rest of our body and the large intestines push through the waste that creates our bowel movements. The children were fascinated that our kidneys process the body’s water and the liver filters toxins.  The children learned where the organs are located with the help of our Living Internal Organ T-shirt.  The shirt helped the children find the organs location by velcroing the organs to the corresponding spot on the t-shirt.

The following week we learned about George Washington and how he was our first president and how Abraham Lincoln came from a poor family and freed the slaves.  We were introduced to Franklin F. Roosevelt and how he was president during World War II and how John F. Kennedy fought for equal rights.  We then learned that Barack Obama was current president and the first African American president. The children were taught that the president’s wives are called the first lady and that the president lives in the white house in Washington DC, and flies on a jet called Air Force 1.  We discussed what responsibilities the President has.  The children came up with keeping us safe, keeping the world safe and running the country.  Many coloring pages were used as well as coloring pages to help identify which president is on what coin.
We went back in time to discover some ancient cultures.  First, we went to ancient Egypt and learned that their kings were called Pharaohs and when the Pharaohs died they used a process called mummification to preserve their bodies.  We saw that the mummies on Scooby Doo were not the same as the mummies of the ancient Egyptians!  The Pharaohs were sent to the after-world with gold, jewels and treasured personal items.  The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids and the sphinx and used hieroglyphics to write stories.
We visited Mt. Olympus and met some gods and goddesses.  We met Zeus the god of the sky and the heavens.  He rode a winged horse called Pegasus and if you angered Zeus he would throw a lightning bolt at you.  We went to the depths of the ocean and met Poseidon.  Poseidon was the god of the seas.  He rode a chariot pulled by horses and carried a trident.  Stay on the good side of him if you want to sail safely across the ocean.  Then we met Hades the god of the underworld and of the dead.  He liked when people died because he thought he would be stronger with more people to rule and he had a three headed dog on a leash.  We discovered there were some very interesting mythical creatures in ancient Greece, the Centaur that had the body of a horse and chest and head of a man.  The Cyclopes were giant one eyed creatures who fought for Zeus and made Zeus’s lightning bolts. Finally we learned the name of the three headed dog of Hades.  It was known as Cerberus and it guarded the gates of the underworld.

Cultural Subjects
The class has been counting to 10 in twenty-six different languages, English (that is our native language), Spanish, Sign Language, German, French, Japanese, Greek, Arabic w/Lebanese dialect, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Hebrew, Swedish, Korean, Polish, Hungarian, Tagalog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh, Dutch/Flemish, and Serbo-Croatian.

Kindergarten Lesson

We started out the month introducing addition using the golden beads.  The introduction of beads shows the kindergarteners a solid correspondence between the written symbol and physical quantity. We also discussed what tools could be used in their own classroom to help with addition, such as the table top rods, color bead bars and addition strip board.  We briefly touched upon dynamic addition with exchanges (carry overs).  We then introduced multiplication.  I explained multiplication is simply adding many times. We introduced fractions the last week of the month. We learned that we can divide anything as long as it can be divided into equal parts.  Even our kindergarten class can be divided!  We divided our class from girls/boys, Mr. John’s, Ms. Kate’s, and Ms. Sabrina’s class, and eye color.We then learned about different shapes.  We knew that a triangle has three sides but we learned that a triangle with three equal sides is called an equilateral triangle, with two equal sides is an isosceles, and with no equal sides it is called a scalene triangle. Any shape with four sides is a quadrilateral.  Some examples include a square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezoid, and a chevron.  We realized that the Greek language was very important when learning about the pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, and decagon.