What's Blooming In Our
Kinder-Garden?

We will be working on letters U, V, W. We are learning their names and sounds, "magic pictures," as well as the movements that go with each letter (except the vowels). We will be blending with the phonograms -un, -ig, and -an. We will be working on our next two high frequency readers, "Look!" and "Big." These are the 13th and 14th book we work on. We continue to work on our sight words. We are also doing the "100 Book Challenge" program.

MATH
We are starting a new unit, Making Shapes and Building Blocks (Exploring Geometry). "In this introduction to geometry, students look for 2-D and 3-D shapes in their classroom environment. Using different materials they explore how shapes can be combined to make other shapes. In additions, students begin to work with 2-D representations of 3-D objects." (From the teacher's manual) We will also be working on telling time to the hour using both a digital and an analog clock.

SCIENCE
We are learning about the spring season and it's characteristice. We are comparing spring to the other seasons.

GROW TABLE
As part of our science curriculum we are also studying plants - how plants grow, what plants need and the parts of the plant. We have planted seeds and are observing how they grow. We also have a plant which is growing in water. That allows us to observe the roots of the plant. Having done a reading unit on the dessert, we have some cactus plants that a student brought. Finally, we are observing a Venus flytrap plant which another student brought.

CHICK HATCHING
We have an incubator in our room and we're waiting for our chick eggs to hatch. We have 22 eggs in the incubator. We've learned new words such as incubator, embryo, and egg tooth. Our chicks have to be in the incubator for 21 days. They are due to hatch on Thursday, May 9th. We'll keep you posted.

RAINFOREST UNIT
We are in the middle of our Rainforest unit. We have read many stories about the rainforest. We have looked on the globe and found the different places where there are rainforests. We have learned about the 4 layers of the rainforest - forest floor, understory, canopy and emergent layer. We have learned about many of the animals that live there. We have discussed the importance of the rainforest and the problems facing the forest. The most fun has been building a rainforest in our room. Be careful when you enter our room. You won't know if there is a poisonous frog or a slithering snake nearby!

SOCIAL STUDIES
Our rainforest unit helped lead us into a study about environmental awareness. Our class volunteer, Miss Kathy, presented several lessons on the 3 R's - reduce, reuse, and recycle. We talked about why it was important to take care of our earth and what were some of the ways that we could do this. We sorted different items into paper, metal, and plastic categories. We even made some recycle sculptures using the recycle items she brought to class.