Welcome to August and September in Kindergarten.   The students were very excited to play with the toys in the classroom for structured play time.  We played in the doll house, with bristle blocks, magnets, trains and puppets.  Your children have been communicating about playing with others and sharing their toys.   Here are a few things that we look at when the children are playing.

What are the expectations of purposeful play?

Purposeful play classrooms do not simply provide opportunities for children to play, but also encourage children to challenge themselves; reflect on their own understanding; tap into their interests, needs, or talents to make connections and to develop self-efficacy as learners.

What is the purposeful play approach?

Purposeful play means play is integrated into curriculum, instruction, and assessment. We know that play is an integral part of how young children learn, so it makes sense to use it as a leading instructional strategy.

Purposeful Play

Questions to think about to help me plan my play:

• What am I curious about? 

• What problem do I want to solve today?

• What could I build and how; what will I use?

• What could I create and what materials will I use to create this?

• Who do I want to be?

• Where do I want to travel?

We played with big books, puppets, flannel boards and made bracelets.  

Math Stations in Kindergarten

 We worked with Pattern Blocks today in math stations.

 Outside play time at the park

When the weather is nice we will try to get outside for a short movement break in the morning with all the kindergarten classes.

Name writing

We have been practicing writing our names for the first few weeks of school.

 Clifford's Birthday Celebration

The room was full of RED on Friday to celebrate Clifford's Birthday.  We made Emily Elizabeth and Clifford face masks to surprise our parents with the at the end of the day.   During the stations we were matching Clifford Ten Frames to work on counting and matching numbers.

The students had fun finding letters in the sand to make new words.   We searched for letters to make Clifford the Big Red Dog in the sand.

 We played a Clifford Board Game and tried to make it to Clifford's Dog house at the end of the game. The students weighed real dog bones to see which bones weighed more or less. We also read Clifford books and tallied how many times we found the word Clifford in the book.  Thanks to all the parents that came into the classroom to help with the stations. We could not have done it without you. 

Puzzle Time and Name writing in Kindergarten 

We worked on our phonics and practiced finding the letters in our name.  This was a challenge especially for some of the students with longer names!  But we ALL did it!  I'm so proud of them!  

Math Time    

We worked on counting cubes during math time this week.  We took turns finding numbers and putting that amount of blocks together.  We have been counting up to 100 by 1's on our number grids.  Here is the song we use to count to 100.

Our Library Field Trip

Today we went to the library and had fun exploring the library and all that it has to offer.  We went on a tour of the library and did a scavenger hunt and we were able to play with the toys at the library. If you don't have a library card please be sure to look at the information that was sent to you regarding how to sign up for one.  Thank you to all the parents that were able to come and help out with the library field trip.

Apple Week   

Today we played many games that revolved around the theme of apples.  We had counted apples to place on the apple tree, we sorted all the ways to make a number and we matching ukpper and lower case letters on an apple tree.  This was a fun way to end the week on a 1/2 day of apple stations.