Today we had the wonderful opportunity of meeting up with EC3B. We read our just-right books to them and felt proud to share our reading with others. Ask your child to tell you about it!
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Monday, March 27, 2017
New Unit of Inquiry
Last week we began our new unit of inquiry, which focuses on fabric. We will be examining many different aspects of fabric, and will also be inquiring into other areas of study within other subject areas. Please take a moment to read through the newsletter below as it will provide more detailed information as to where we are headed:
To begin this unit, we closely examined photos of various people around the world. We shared our thinking about what and why specific people were wearing certain clothes. Were they doing something special? Was the person in a location that might require that clothing? We shared our thoughts with one another and built off each others' thinking, which was recorded in scripted form.
To allow us to demonstrate our initial individual understanding of this unit, we then were each given a photo and asked to elaborate on the clothing we saw the person wearing. We used the app ThingLink to capture our thoughts. Take a look at one example:
The information gathered through these engagements will help determine what prior knowledge we already have and where we need to start.
We then explored six different types of fabric. We worked in partnerships to describe the fabrics and think about where we might have seen these fabrics being used. This was followed by a 'fabric hunt' around the school. Our goal was to find the various fabrics and who was using each and why. (See more photos from our fabric hunt by clicking here.)
The next day, we returned to these recording sheets and photos of ourselves exploring fabrics throughout school. We spent time recording the properties of each fabric and what important job each fabric was doing in each photo taken of our fabric hunt. We found patterns (such as many of them were used to protect people from various things) and also noticed that the fabrics seemed to have been chosen to fill a specific need.
KG-B is looking forward to continuing to explore fabrics and their many uses. As noted in the newsletter posted above, please do let us know if you would be willing to come in and share how you use fabric -- either as a hobby, for work or cultural reasons.
Friday, March 10, 2017
Math Workshop
Our math workshop time the past several weeks has focused on combining and separating numbers. We have worked quite extensively with number bonds, which has helped us solidify our understanding of what it means to add.
Throughout this unit on addition and subtraction, we have incorporated whole-body kinesthetics to physically add and remove ourselves to different groups, and we have also used manipulatives to play around with sets of numbers.
During the "practice" portion of math workshop we often engage in games and hands-on activities. We learned three new games this week. Ask your child to tell you about them, and maybe even find some games to play at home! Click here to see some ideas that involve only a deck of cards and are fun for the whole family.
Throughout this unit on addition and subtraction, we have incorporated whole-body kinesthetics to physically add and remove ourselves to different groups, and we have also used manipulatives to play around with sets of numbers.
During the "practice" portion of math workshop we often engage in games and hands-on activities. We learned three new games this week. Ask your child to tell you about them, and maybe even find some games to play at home! Click here to see some ideas that involve only a deck of cards and are fun for the whole family.
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