February Highlights- A Month of Celebration!

When February rolls around each year, as a Kindergarten teacher you always know it's going to be a month that is chock full of celebration.  February 2016 certainly lived up to all of the wonderful celebratory expectations.  Although it's the shortest month of the year, we wasted no learning time, and had tons of fun doing it!

We began February by making very important predictions...for Groundhog's Day! On February first we made predictions as to whether or not the Groundhog would see his shadow.  In the Science Lab we learned that in order to see a shadow, there needs to be sun.  We even did an awesome experiment creating "sun" with the light from a flashlight.  We also took this back to the classroom and created fun shadows with our hands using the light from the projector.  We counted and compared the results from our predictions and waited until February 2nd came around to find out who was right. Punxatawney Phil saw no shadow, and told us we'd see an early spring! While it wasn't a very snowy winter, there's nothing more exciting than the weather starting to warm up, and the days lasting longer.  It won't be long now!

We didn't need to wait very long for our next special day!  On February 3rd we had our awesome Gym and Me event.  We had a spectacular morning, where the children were able to share some of their experiences during Physical Education with their families.  We had a wonderful turn out and even some awesome participation by family members.  We finished off the event with a healthy snack provided by our fabulous families.  Thank you for helping us to make this year's Gym and Me a wonderful success.

On February 3rd we also celebrated a special Global School Play Day! We are so lucky that our children learn in an environment where play is encouraged and celebrated all the time.  We see incredible value in giving our children opportunities to collaborate, socialize, problem solve and think critically, and all of that can be done through play.  On Global School Play Day we took some extra time out of our day to share some toys, puzzles and games, and even did some playing with our buddies.  It was awesome!

In reading and writing we have been studying Non Fiction.  We began by exploring different non fiction sources, both books and using the internet.  We learned about research and that we can use non fiction sources to find out facts about many things.  We began our research as a class on different arctic animals.  We've read many books and used sources like Pebble Go to learn information about several different animals that live in the arctic.  The children have been so excited to find out new information through their research. We are now in the process of writing non fiction books with facts about these animals.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks for our first published research pieces!

Our next celebration was a fabulous cultural experience for our whole class.  We celebrated the Lunar New Year.  We had two visits from two wonderful moms of students in our class to teach us different things about the New Year.  First Michael's mom, a professional artist,  came to teach us a beautiful art project.  We used ink on red paper, because red is the color of good luck.  We wrote Chinese characters and learned how to paint a monkey, because this year is the Year of the Monkey!  Thank you so much to Michael's mom for this amazing morning.

In the afternoon we had another special visitor.  Serena's mom came to our class to teach us more about the Lunar New Year.  She read us a story and taught us all about different symbols of good luck for the Lunar New Year.  We received red envelopes with money inside, and an orange which are both symbols of luck.  Another one of these special symbols is a cherry blossom.  With Serena's mom we made our own cherry blossoms with tissue paper.  Thank you to Serena's mom for another fabulous afternoon of learning about the Chinese culture.

Right before our February break, we had some more celebrating to do!  We celebrated our love for our friends and classmates on Valentine's day.  We participated some great literacy and math centers throughout the day that highlighted and reviewed the skills we've been working on.  We did some great matching and partner activities with double ten frames and teen numbers.  We have learned in math that a teen number always starts with a 1, which stands for a group of 10 (or one whole ten frame) and is followed by the number which stands for the "extra ones."  This has given us a great foundation for learning place value and continues our study of cardinality.  On valentines day we also did some sorting, counting, tallying and graphing with yummy candy hearts, and played a "Love"ly sight word bingo game.

In the afternoon we celebrated by sharing the Valentines we made for each other.  Love and friendship filled the room as we all wished each other a Happy Valentines Day.  We then celebrated with a yummy red themed party with food and drinks contributed by the families.  Thanks once again to our two awesome class moms for always organizing great parties and to the volunteers who always step up to provide for us.  We truly feel the LOVE!

 After a week of relaxation and family time off from school, we returned on the first day back to arguably one of the most memorable days of the year for Kindergarteners...the 100th day of school!  The 100th day is no ordinary day.  It is a day we have been counting up to since September, and we just couldn't wait to celebrate in so many ways.  We kicked off our day in our PJs by eating breakfast together.  We had each counted out 100 pieces of cereal at home, and brought them into school to enjoy.  For the rest of the day we celebrated with activities that included a 100 piece snack mix, making 100 crowns and glasses, racing to 100 with dice and making a transformation out of the number 100.  We even ended the day with a classroom search for 100 Hershey kisses.  It was another day full of fun, celebrating, and learning.

Throughout February we worked with our 5th grade buddies to create a project based on the book Not A Box by Antoinette Portis.  Our buddies brought in boxes and over the course of a few weeks, we transformed these boxes into so many different things.  The creations included doll houses, rocket ships, dinosaurs, robots and so many more!  The creativity that our children and their buddies exhibited was mind blowing.  Ask your child about their Not A Box experience with their 5th grade buddy.

February was Dental Health Month!  We were lucky enough to have a visit from Jack's mom, who is a Dentist.  She taught the whole Kindergarten class many things about our teeth and how to keep them healthy.  Thank you Dr. A for teaching us so much about ways to keep our teeth healthy, and giving us tooth brushes and tooth pastes to make sure our healthy habits are right on track.  You can check out our healthy smiles in the hallway outside our classroom with a guessing game.  Stop by and see if you can figure out which healthy smile belongs to which happy kid!

We ended our month of celebration on February 29th because it is a Leap Year!  We learned that a Leap Year happens every 4 years, because it takes the sun 365 days and 6 hours to circle the sun.  Every 4 years we add up those extra hours to one whole day.  For the next Leap Year in 2020, we will be 9 and 10 years old!

Believe it or not these highlights are only some of the exciting experiences we had in February. There were so many days of learning, collaborating, exploring and of course growing in between all of the celebrations!  We can't wait for March where we have lots more learning to do, and of course most importantly... SPRING!

Peace, Love and Kindergarten,

Miss Grossman