This week in Senior Kindergarten...

This week we have split the students from our class and Mrs. Kepran-Blair/Miss Nykolak's class into two groups...JK and SK.  The SK students have been doing activities and stories specific to their abilities and interests.  This is not a permanent situation, just a change of pace.  

We have been reading Something From Nothing and The Balloon Tree, both written by Phoebe Gilman.  We have been working on retelling stories.  Your child will be bringing home a ziploc bag with pictures that will act as prompts to remind them of the events in the story.  If you want to read the story together, here are the links to these great books!  

(The ziploc bags will be sent home by Friday.)

Happy Reading and Retelling!


 Something From Nothing



The Balloon Tree

# Lemonade or should I say # cucumbers?

Two girls had a play date on the PD Day Friday and they had a lemonade stand together.  They had so much fun they asked if we could have a lemonade stand at school.  So...they got to work organizing and making a list of what they would need.  They decided they needed cups, signs, a price tag, decorations and of course...lemonade!

Notice the signs...the lemonade is five cents for a cup.  

"Hey...we should put this on Facebook.  I'll make the Facebook thing...it's blue right with a white f?"

"What about hash tag...hash tag lemonade..."

"Can you send this to my mom on your phone?"

The children cut coloured paper to make different flavours of lemonade...but they wanted to sell something real.  Real lemonade.  Real lemonade was impossible that day because we didn't have the ingredients.  One of the girls was determined to find something real to sell.  She noticed a bag of cucumbers in the kitchen that were delivered for healthy snack.  She grabbed them and begged to 'sell' them at the lemonade stand.  

"Do you take credit cards?"

The cucumbers were a hit!

"We made lots of money! Maybe we should put hash tag cucumber!"

The next day I brought in real lemonade...

They decided that if you wanted lemonade you should put your name on your cup so nobody would drink from the wrong cup.

The kids counted their coins.

The lemonade was served...

The line was endless...

"Make sure you pay for this please."

"This is the money cup and then we put it in the cash register."

"One cup please."

"You can pay right here."

The class LOVED the lemonade stand!  The learning that takes place during dramatic play always surprises me.  You can never predict what the focus will be.  Last time we had a store they were focused on the coins (money).  They wanted to know what each coin was called and how much each coin was worth.  Another time, it was all about the signs, and everyone involved made one.  They talked about the spelling, the decorating, the planning.  This time it was all about the problem solving.  Everyone wanted to help make the lemonade, everyone wanted a turn on the cash register, and everyone wanted a turn pouring the lemonade.  Every time I turned around there was a problem to be solved.  And every time there was a problem, there was a group of students ready to solve it.  They worked through every problem.  Sometimes they needed the help of a teacher, and sometimes they figured it out on their own.   

Shapes shapes everywhere...

We've been talking about shapes...all kinds of  two dimensional shapes and three dimensional solids.  Some students focused on learning about and identifying two dimensional shapes, while other students focused on learning more about three dimensional solids.  

We played musical chairs and when the music stopped you had to sit in a chair and tell everyone the shape or solid that was on your chair.  We played 'hide the solid' and 'hide the shape', where one person hides the shape/solid and then other children have to find them and identify them.  We talked about how many sides for each two dimensional shape and how many faces for three dimensional shapes.  We played games on the smart board to help us learn too!

"I made a house out of squares.  The dinosaurs live inside."

"I made a big rectangular prism."

"I used lots of rectangles.  There are circles on top too."

"These have rectangle shapes...I think they are rectangular prisms!"

"I can play baseball with a sphere and a cylinder."

"I'm like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle with my cylinders."

We build structures out of the solids sent in from our families.

Thank you to everyone who sent things in!!!

We drew pictures of the structures we built.

"I made a castle!"

"We made a rocket on a launcher.  It has a cone on top."

We found all sorts of solids in our lunch bags!!

"Here is my cylinder (yogurt tube) and my juice box

is a rectangular prism!"

"My chocolate milk is close to a cylinder!" 

"There's a whole bag of spheres! (grapes)"  

"I have a sphere too!"

"CYLINDER!!!"

"I have a rectangular prism!"

"I have a rectangular prism too!"

We had a Frozen concert ..."My microphone is a cylinder."

"Let it go...let it go..."

A group of girls who rarely build with blocks got right into finding shapes while they built this house.

We built shapes and solids using marshmallows and toothpicks.

Shapes are everywhere!!