Thanksgiving Fun in Kindergarten!

The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were filled with books and activities that focused on the holiday past and present. We learned about the Pilgrims and Native Americans, and how different their daily life was from ours today.

  Our Let's Find Out by Scholastic showed us some of the chores that Pilgrim Children and Native American had to do.  Collecting buckets of water and firewood were a couple of the chores that we thought would be tiring.

We sorted pictures of transportation, food, and activities according to whether they were from Long Ago or Today.  Riding a horse was tricky because it's an animal that people still ride, like some police in Portland.

We made Long Ago houses from popsicle sticks. People long ago would often have a fire outside to cook.

Quilting and sewing was an activity that both the Pilgrims and the Native Americans did.  We made foam quilt squares and sewed them together to make a class quilt.

No Thanksgiving week would be complete without a Mayflower project. We made a lap book with things were are thankful for, our favorite foods, and Mayflower facts.

We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! 

Kindergarten students use materials such as c-rods and sorting mats to 

reinforce math concepts.

2nd Step Mondays

We use the program 2nd step school wide at Riverton. This year in Kindergarten we are doing our lessons together as a whole grade level every Monday in the Large Learning Center.

This week our lesson focused on Following Directions. We played a game called Follow, Follow and used our attent-o-scope to focus our attention on the speaker.

In the scenario card a child didn't know what to do when it was work time because he had not focused his attention on his teacher. We noticed that he may feel worried, sad, or confused while he was sitting at his table. We then brainstormed that he could ask the student next to him what to do or ask his teacher.  It's also helpful to repeat the directions to yourself to help you remember.

Ask your child if they can sing our Learner Song. "Eyes are watching, ears are listening, voice is quiet, body's calm. This is how we listen, this is how we listen, at group time, at group time."

Eek Spiders!

We have been learning about some creepy crawlers in Kindergarten! We read a ton of books about spiders ,  The Very Busy Spider and Aaaaarrgghh! Spider! were two of our favorites.  We learned that spiders are not insects, that they start their webs by making an X, and there are more then 40,000 different kinds of spiders! EEK!!!!