VT Animals & Festive Fun!

 

I’d like to take a moment to share how grateful I am to spend my days with your children. They bring such joy, enthusiasm, and a genuine love of learning to our classroom each day. There are not many jobs where you get to receive 25 hugs or be showered with handmade pictures daily!! I feel truly lucky.

This week, students continued their exploration of shapes through hands-on games, creating shape pictures, and contributing to a collaborative shape mural. In science and literacy, students created clay figurines of the Vermont animal they chose to study and researched its food and habitat using PebbleGo and nonfiction books. After the break, we’re excited to begin building the habitats for these animals!

Each week, we continue to add more high-frequency words—also known as power words and heart words—to our growing word bank! So far, we have: A, I, is, the, do, to, love, this, and, an, am, look. It’s exciting to see students noticing these words in their reading and beginning to use them in their writing.

Wishing you all a peaceful break filled with rest, connection, and gratitude!  See you in December! ❄

Snow, Shapes, & Organisms, Oh My!

 

What a crew!!

Another great week of learning is in the books! Students dove into new science concepts, exploring wild vs. domestic animals and living vs. nonliving organisms through reading, writing, and hands-on games.

In math, students explored shapes, shapes, and more shapes! They practiced creating different shapes and noticing how the world around us is made up of them. We also talked about special attributes—for example, a triangle has three sides and three vertices (corners).

 

Snowy Peaks and New Beginnings!

The snow on the mountains is reminding us that colder days are ahead and it’s time to pull out those cozy, warm clothes!

This week, we kicked off a few new learning adventures! In Science, we began our study of Organisms, using our observation skills to explore patterns in what plants and animals need to survive. This connects beautifully with our new literacy unit, Zoology. Each lesson is built around a key life science concept and weaves together language arts and science standards. Kindergartners love learning about animals and can’t get enough of the fascinating facts they’re discovering!

In Math, we began Unit 3: 2-D Geometry. We’re developing ideas about the attributes of two-dimensional shapes—naming them, noticing their features, and exploring how we can compose and decompose them into new shapes.

We had several special guests visit this week! It began with people from the Community Bank who came to help us take part in the Blankets for Hope project. Students wrote notes and wrapped a blanket with ribbon to be given to people in need.  It was a beautiful project to be involved with.

The MMU Choir stopped by to share their beautiful voices in a joyful array of songs at our all school meeting.  Many students after said that they can't wait to become singers in high school! Later that day, Ms. Neeson led an extraordinary lesson inspired by Eric Carle, showing us how he creates his colorful illustrations. Each student created their own animal using his process and learned how to create community art for all to enjoy and repurpose. Thank you, Ms. Neeson!

Greetings!

What a fun and busy week we had in Kindergarten! We kicked it off with a visit from the famous Recycle Rhonda! She’s from the Chittenden Solid Waste District and travels around teaching students about the 4 R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot (compost). Her enthusiasm and passion for caring for our earth are truly contagious!

Students also enjoyed retelling stories this week. Creating masks for Where the Wild Things Are was a blast, and acting it out in the forest was a wildly fun time! We spent time reading Pete the Cat stories and compared and contrasted the similarities and differences we found in them. We carried this comparison theme into math, where we compared the heights of our block towers with objects around the room and, later in the week, compared the lengths of our names.

On Friday, we had our very first Buddy Classroom time with Mrs. Jones’s class! Together, we went a little batty learning all about bats. 🦇 We wrote fun bat facts, colored, and even painted bats using leaves! It was such a fun way to work together and make new friends. We can’t wait to meet up with our buddies again next month!