Music Around the World Week 2--Africa

We had so much fun in our Music Around the World Class today! We began our morning by reviewing our songs from last week. Ask your child to sing "It's a Small World" and "Kookaburra" for you! We are really working hard to learn the words for these two songs. We also reviewed the song, "La Raspa" from Latin America. We had a great time working on keeping a steady beat, while shaking our maracas or scraping our guiros. Wow do our kids have rhythm! After a quick review, we jumped into learning all about our new country of the day--Africa!

We were introduced to a child from Africa and learned about a day in her life on our Time for Kids website. Then, we were in for a fabulous treat--a visit from a real musician, Mr. Mark! Mr. Mark taught us about some of Africa's favorite instruments--drums! He played several different types of drums for us. We loved them all! Then, we enjoyed some traditional African music from the African Children's Choir. We were so inspired by these musical experiences that we decided to create our own African instruments--drums and shakers. Finally, we learned an African chant and our own rousing rendition of "This Little Light of Mine" complete with African drums and shakers! Here is a show of our morning! Check it out and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. We have also included some pictures from another great day! We hope that you enjoy them! Today was so much fun! We can't wait until next week! :) 

https://vimeo.com/123524658

Another Fun Week!

Wow! We have had another fun week in Kindergarten! This week we finished up our positional words  study with some interactive fun outside playing positional word games. We reviewed inside/outside, above/below, and over/under. Here is a video of our day. Check it out and leave us a comment to let us know what you thought about our outside games.

Throughout this week, we also finished our math study of two dimensional shapes. We went on a shape hunt around the school and took pictures of circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles that we found in the real world. Then, we created a keynote of our pictures. Here is our show below for you to enjoy. We talked a lot this week about each shape and compared them by looking at their sides and corners. We also created shape fish and shape animals during an exciting art project. We hope you like our pictures of our projects below.

Finally, we completed our science unit on paper by exploring different ways that we could change paper. This included an opportunity to explore paper boxes, paper recycling, and paper/wood creations. We also discussed why it is important to recycle and conserve paper, in order to save our trees. Check out our show of our experiments and pictures from our art projects below. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_CGJElEYcj8VHZBQlBNdGpGZHM/view?usp=sharing

Music Around the World Week 1--Australia

Welcome to our Music Around the World Club! I am so very excited that your child is joining me in this journey as we travel around the world exploring different countries and their unique music. I have two loves in life—music and children— so I could not be more thrilled to share this experience together with your child. We are going to learn to play instruments and sing songs from different countries. Then, we will share our music with you all on Thursday night, April 30th at 7:00 P.M. Please save this date on your calendar! It is sure to be a night that you will not want to miss! Thank you again for allowing me the privilege to work with your child. I can not wait to share this experience together!

We began our musical tour around the world today by talking about the universal language of music and how it can touch all hearts and help all people. Then, we enjoyed singing "It's a Small World" together before flying around the world to Australia. 

The land down under had a lot to offer us! We learned about everything from koala bears to kangaroos and spent a "day in the life" of a boy from Australia on the Time for Kids website. We were also introduced to two of Australia's favorite instruments--bilmas and digeridoos. After listening to one of Australia's traditional songs featuring these instruments, we made our very own bilmas and digeridoos. Boy were they cool too! Finally, we began learning the Australian song that we are going to perform, Kookaburra. It is a silly song that will make you giggle and laugh, while allowing you to soak up the unique sounds of the digeridoos and the bilmas. Here is a show of our first day together. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about our first week in Music Around the World!

https://vimeo.com/122813033 

Positional Words, Paper, and Popplett...Oh! My!

What a busy week back from Spring Break we have had! This week during our reading lessons we have been studying about positional words (prepositional phrases). Through exciting and sometimes silly games and songs we have been learning about top/middle/bottom, over/under/on, left/right, and above/below. Check out our show below and see all the fun things that we have been up to this week. Be aware...you just might find yourself humming along!

https://vimeo.com/122811355

(Featured songs or games include: a rousing rendition of Top, Middle, and the Bottom, a "Roll a Dice" game with Over/Under/On, a chance to kick along to the "Cupid Shuffle" while learning left/right, and a "Pin the Bird on the Cloud" game for Above/Below.)

Another engaging experience that we enjoyed this week was Digital Learning Day! On Wednesday, we participated in a Kindergarten carousel where we visited each Kindergarten teacher and learned to use a unique app that provided us with a chance to show off our learning. In Miss Hensley's room, we enjoyed Chatterpix for Kids where we made our sight words talk. Mrs. Pena shared Popplett with us and allowed us to create our own bubble maps where we drew items that started with a letter of our choice. Finally, Miss Todd showed us how to use 30 Hands where we created slides with pictures and recordings of our leveled readers. We had a wonderful time and are now able to use these apps in our reading stations to make our own creations. Here is a show highlighting our day. Check it out and see what all we learned on Digital Learning Day!

https://vimeo.com/122716909

In math, we have been working hard to solve addition and subtraction problems, using model drawing. This is the math program that they use in Singapore. Research has shown it to be very effective. Model drawing is a way for children to not only solve a story problem but to be able to prove why the answer is true. In order for our students to have a solid foundation in number sense, we find the ability to fully explain your reasoning behind your answer to be a very important skill. Model drawing allows our students the opportunity to practice doing this. Below you can see how we were able to solve problems that Miss Todd challenged us with this week.

We have become so very talented at solving problems that Miss Todd encouraged us to make up our own problems and solve them, as well. Here are some of those problems. We hope that you like them! See if you can make up a model drawing problem of your own!

Finally, in science we explored ten different types of paper throughout the week. Each day we preformed a different experiment on our paper to see what would happen and compared the reactions of each piece. In our show below, you will see the results of each experiment and hear about what we learned from them! Our show includes experimenting with writing on paper, folding paper, and putting water on paper. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. 

https://vimeo.com/122876439

Dr. Suess Day

This week we celebrated Dr. Suess's birthday! We began our Dr. Suess Day with a special breakfast of green eggs and ham! It turns out that we DO like green eggs and ham!

In addition to enjoying a special breakfast, we were also allowed to dress up in our Dr. Suess attire. Here are a couple of pictures of some of the super cute outfits that we wore from home. We have also included a show of the hats that we made ourselves at school, as well.

https://animoto.com/play/v9TV03pfkc48RmX0Z261

During our fun day, we also created a book for the Cat and the Hat filled with special hats of many different colors. He even had a silly hat. His favorite hat of all turned out to be the red one! I wonder why?

 We finished our day with an exciting day of drumming in P.E. We had the opportunity to learn a traditional African song and had the chance to play the drums along with our drum leader. Here is one of the songs that we learned. We hope you like it! Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about our fun day! Thank you for sharing it with us!

https://vimeo.com/121217409