Bat Learning

This week the children will be learning about bats. The Dramatic Play Centre has been set up as a bat cave. I have placed two small tables together and covered it with an old brown blanket. I attached cotton batten to the underneath part of the tables to represent spider webs. Two or three children will be able to lay inside the cave and read books by flashlight. I also picked up a couple of plastic bats and made a couple of bat head band (made from construction paper) for the children to wear.

 

The learning about bats will assist the children to learn the differences between nonfiction books and fiction books. I will record the children's learning on chart paper which will be posted outside of the classroom. The St. Catharines Library had a number of nonfiction books (that I felt were at the Kindergarten level) so I was able to supply the classroom with about 6 or 7 bat books.

 

Our poem this week will be about bats and we will be doing a bat fingerplay that begins with 5 bats and goes down to one bat, which reinforces the early concept of subtraction. The children will have an opportunity to place sentences strips matching into a pocket chart, that match the finger play sentences.

 

The math is related to bats in a number of ways. The children will be able to stamp a bat pattern because I purchased some bat stampers from Michaels. I also made a booklet where the children count the number of bats on the page write the number and show the number on a ten frame. It will be interesting to see how many of the children are able to subitize when counting the bats.

The children wanted brown and black play dough but I explained that it would be too messy. So they opted for red and blue.

 

 

New Math Expectation

 

Starting about Wednesday the children will be introduced to a new math expectation where they will learn to describe, sort, classify, build and compare two-dimensional shapes, such as triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles. The children are expected to learn the names of each of these shapes and to identify the shapes. In the area of comparing the shapes, the children will learn to learn how many sides the shapes have and the number of vertices (corners). They will also be introduced to hexagons, trapezoids, and rhombus. However, they do not need to name and compare these shapes but being aware of them will assist the children in grade one. 

 

By Heart Words

 

For this week the by heart words are:   we    red. I have decided that each week I will add a colour word since the children are required to know these words by heart also. Parents please be sure to keep practising these words. Next week the children will print the word and stamp the word as additional practise with these words. The children love using the stampers and this assists them to recognize the letters of the alphabet. Another activity to assist the children to recognize letters of the alphabet is where they roll a number cube that has letters of the alphabet on it and the letter they get when rolled they colour that letter. The first letter to have all the slots coloured wins the little game. I love using games and centres to assist with the children's learning because many skills are being reinforced but all they know is that they are having fun.

 

 

Little Books

 

Many of the children really enjoy making their little books. This week the books will be:

I see books. The children have 4 pages in their books and print I see a on each page and then make a picture of what they see. For example, I see a dog. The children who are SK's

I help them to print the word by making the sounds for them. While talking about writing the sounds, writing is a very difficult task for young children. If they feel that words must be spelled correctly they will rarely challenge themselves to write. I want them to love to write and to believe that they are writers and authors. Therefore, I tell them to write the sounds they hear and then they become more confident in the area of writing and write more detailed stories.