Last week, the Kindergarteners began a plant unit. In order to kick it off with a bang, Room #7 boys and girls participated in a Van Gogh Sunflower Workshop. We began this engaging and fun workshop by reading Camille and the Sunflowers, a picture book that tells a bit about the life of Vincent Van Gogh and his beautiful paintings. Afterwards, the students visited different stations that focused on the central theme of plants.
· Roll and Write – At this station, the cherubs practiced reading and writing plant-based vocabulary.
· Sunflower Portraits – Everyone embodied Van Gogh’s technique and made their own sunflower resist portraits using craypas and watercolor paints. They observed actual sunflowers and drew what they saw. It is awesome to see how different and unique each portrait is!
· Bean Mosaics – Using various types of beans and seeds, students created beautiful sunflower pictures. This multi-step process required the kiddos to sketch their picture first with pencil, then glue on the seeds and/or beans in each section. The resulting products are one-of-a-kind keepsakes! If you have a chance, stop by Room #7 to take a look!
· Plant Bingo – The boys and girls practiced their plant vocabulary with this fun game!
· How many words can you find in Sunflower? – Given magnetic letters, the kiddos worked hard to discover as many words as they possibly could hidden within the word, sunflower! Tricky, tricky!
Many of our Math stations this week center around chicks! It's such an exciting time in Kindergarten!
· Chicken Little Tessellation – To go along with our chick unit, we read the book, Chicken Little. Using Pattern Blocks, students made this loveable chicken and then counted how many of each block was needed. Lastly, they counted the total.
· How Many Chicks? How Many Legs? – This engaging book activity required students to stretch their thinking. Each page asked students to draw a certain number of chicks and figure out how many legs in total the page contains. As a result, some kiddos are even starting to count by 2’s! Way to go!!
· Roll, Count, Cover – The game board at this station had eggs on it with various numbers embedded inside. Each child rolled two dice and added the numbers together to find the sum. Then, he/she covered the corresponding egg until they were all covered!
· 10 Shape and More - subtraction – An oldie with a twist! Each child took a ten frame and one other shape and wrote the total number of cubes needed to fill both shapes (always a teen number). Next, the kids rolled number cubes to determine how many Unifix cubes to take away, and finally, recorded the corresponding number sentence. This multi-step process required a lot of brainpower for the children to complete!
· How Many Eggs? – At this station, the boys and girls picked a number they wanted to work with (between 7 and 10). The recording sheet prompted the children to figure out how many white eggs he/she would have if a certain number were brown. So, for example, if I picked the number 9, and the question said: There are 4 brown eggs, I would need to illustrate those eggs to determine how many white I had! Critical thinking!
· 2 Ten Shapes – subtraction – For the past two weeks, students have been working with addition at this station. Now, they are transitioning into subtraction!!! First, each kiddo mixed up the numeral cards. He/she drew a card and built the number shown by putting cubes on the ten shape(s). Next, the cherub rolled a number cube and took that many counters off the ten shape(s), and finally recorded the appropriate number sentence on his/her sheet!
· Fill the Hexagon - With what different shapes can you make a hexagon? At this center, everyone rolled shape dice to determine how to fill in their hexagons. This center really inspired the kids to think critically and carefully to see where they could fit each shape!
The cherubs are learning to solve new words by making connections to words they already know. In class, we’ve been using parts of words we recognize in order to learn new words. For example, the children are familiar with my, and from knowing the -y, learned try and dry.
The class and I are also continuing our work with segmenting! They are becoming quite the pros at splitting up the words into their consequent parts! Ask them to try this exercise at home!
Have a fantastic weekend!