Cuyahoga Falls School

I wanted to again thank Miss Dana and Miss Kathleen for their devotion, love for the children, and hard work.  We do have a new motto that I use at line time… “This is…. a good start, to a good day, with GREAT children.”  My motto for the teachers is “We work. TOGETHER!”

I wanted to again thank Miss Dana and Miss Kathleen for their devotion, love for the children, and hard work.  We do have a new motto that I use at line time… “This is…. a good start, to a good day, with GREAT children.”  My motto for the teachers is “We work. TOGETHER!”
We all returned to school after a well rested, extended winter break.  Due to the long break we did a refresher week covering the classroom ground rules.  We went over the four basic rules of: 1) No running in the classroom.  We do not run because we can get hurt or hurt someone else.  2)  Use our listening ears.  The students pay attention to the teachers during line time and before cleaning the room and line time.  Important information is shared during line time and listening is a sign of respect and courtesy.  3)  Keep our hands to ourselves.  We do this to honor other student’s personal space.  In addition, we do not hit, punch, push or do anything to physically hurt other students.  4) Respect others.  This is basically being nice to your fellow students.  Use nice words, smile instead of giving mean faces, sharing, and helping those in need.

To honor the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. we learned a bit about his life and his accomplishments.  The students became actresses and actors as they recreated Rosa Parks making her stand on a bus in Montgomery Alabama.  The students enjoyed playing the part of the bus driver, Rosa Parks, “the mean guy”, a police officer, Martin Luther King Jr., and passengers on the bus.  We discussed our differences such as skin color, eye color, hair color, and gender.  Then we discussed how we are similar.  We talked about discrimination and segregation.  We talked about if someone with red hair wouldn’t be allowed to do art “just because” they have red hair or if anyone who had blue eyes would have to go to a different classroom with less materials, broken crayons, or no books “just because” they have blue eyes.  I had only boys fetch the chairs for the skit and brought that to the attention of the class.  We had some very sad girls…. I did let the girls take the chairs back after the skit.

 
We sniffed, touched, heard, saw, and even tasted things around us.  We learned about our 5 senses.  Our sense of touch can determine if something is cold or hot, rough or smooth, hard or soft.  We also learned that we can feel on any part of our bodies.  When we feel something it sends a message from your skin to your BRAIN.  The sense of smell captures scents in the air, goes in our noses, and sends a message to the BRAIN.  We learned the sense of sight happens with our eyes.  The eye captures light; the light passes through the eye and sends a message to the BRAIN.  The ear provides our sense of hearing.  The ear captures sounds, the sound travels through the ear canal, hits the ear drum, the ear drum vibrates and sends a message to the BRAIN.  The sense of taste happens in the mouth particularly on the tongue.  The taste buds on the tongue capture the taste and send a message to the BRAIN.  We did have a taste test of sweet (sugar water), salt (salt water), sour (lemon juice), and bitter, my favorite (unsweetened baking chocolate).  For the baking chocolate we use most of our senses.  We started out by looking at the pieces of chocolate. Then we felt the piece of chocolate and smelled the piece of chocolate. THEN… we tasted the piece of chocolate.  (If it looks like a duck, it may not be a duck)  I have to admit this is one of my favorite activities on line time.

We ended the month about learning about our body.  We looked at the skeletal system and if we didn’t have a skeleton we would be one messy blob on the ground!  We learned the skull protects our brain, the rib cage protects our lungs, and the spine keeps us sitting and standing straight.  We learned technical terms for our arms, leg and our digits which is a funny name called phalanges. We brought our life sized foam puzzle into our room.  His name is Elvis because we learned about the pelvis and it was a cool rhyming name.
   This month we started our unit in Math.  We learned about the unit (ones), ten, hundred, and thousand columns.  The kindergarteners composed numbers, and were introduced to dynamic and static addition (with and without carry overs).

Cultural Subjects
During line time lesson we can count to 10 in nineteen different languages (English, Sign Language, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic w/Lebanese dialect, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Tagolog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Irish, Kiswahili, and Welsh.  In kindergarten we can count in the same languages with the addition of three languages (Dutch/Flemish, Serbo-Croatian, and Cebuano).