Weekly Learning Update
We began the week with working on using the muscles in our hands to pull and stretch rubber bands to connect them to teeny-tiny little pegs to make different shapes (to learn geometry) and lines that turned into letters (to learn alphabetic knowledge).
We developed more fine motor and math skills when we tried to duplicate and create our own patterns using pegs and peg boards.
On Thursday morning during Greeting Time, the children took turns assisting Mrs. Laurus in writing our messages for the day. This is an important skill for beginning to learn to read. Children first have to know how to interpret a picture or symbol into meaning. Mrs. Laurus wrote the first message (Yazan isn’t at school today because he is absent). The children wrote the message about 3 days home (three houses labeled with a #1, 2 and 3). Mrs. Laurus wrote a mystery message about the “helper of the day” by writing all of the letters of the helper’s name except for the first letter. Since the children have been using the first letter to help them identify each other’s names, we are now working on noticing and decoding the rest of the letters in each other’s names. This means they had to be able to know most or all of the letters in Abraham’s name… Abraham then came to the board to add the A to his name to complete it. Lastly, the children wrote the messages for a reminder to keep our hands on our own body at school and to use walking feet while we are inside.
We ended our week with a science experiment using two different kinds of peppermint candies. First we used our eyes to look them over carefully and describe what was the same and what was different about them. We then poured water into cups and added one mint to each cup to see what happened to the mints in the water. The end results were really cool!
