Wishing everyone a wonderful vacation and happy new year!   Here is a link to a short video about our kind kindergarten that was made with Eric Mongeon during technology.
http://voice.adobe.com/v/PyhQeMVZjA3

In continuing with our discussion around the spirit of giving and kindness, on Wednesday morning we took some time to make several gifts for giving.  We were fortunate to have two of our faithful ECO volunteers, Marya Dungan (Hannah's grandmother) and Marycolleen Sinnott, join us for the morning.  They helped children create their own wrapping paper for wrapping gifts, and Marycolleen also brought her ukelele and guitar and led us in singing several songs.  All of the gifts should be coming home today and children are very excited to share them with designated recipients!

We also used Tumblebooks, which is an online collection of animated books, to view and compare two non-fiction books about snow.  We used some of the information we gleaned to create a movement sequence about snow- perhaps your child can share some or all of this with you!
I hope everyone has a wonderful, relaxing, and peaceful holiday.

During the last couple of weeks we have been reading books about different winter celebrations including Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa.  As we have read about each holiday we have noticed characteristics they have in common:  light, special foods, gifts, songs, and time with family and friends.  We have focused our discussion to the spirit of giving and have since been exploring books about giving, noticing the many ways we can give to others, from making actual gifts, to giving a hug or a compliment, to simply being kind.  A favorite has been The Quiltmaker's Gift by Jeff Brumbeau.  The whole school is focused on noticing random acts of kindness in the next couple of weeks and our class is enthusiastically taking part, reporting the kind acts of others throughout the day.

It felt like a gift to have the playground covered with loads of fresh snow on Thursday morning!

Just before the Thanksgiving break we were fortunate to get a document camera for our classroom.  This has been a fantastic tool for modeling lessons, sharing student work, and reading emergent books together as a class.  It is also extremely motivational, as everyone is eager to have their work projected on the screen!

A few of the things we have been doing in the last couple of week:

Practicing measuring using both craft sticks and cubes.

Teaching our learning buddies some of our favorite math games.

Working on our forest mural.

Our mural with all of our nature names.

Bundled up for recess!

This week we spent some time talking about seed dispersal, both during ECO and in the classroom.  We learned that if seeds are going to successfully grow they will need their own space, away from their parent plant.  But how do they travel?  Ask your child to tell you some of the ways.  We also visited the river on our way back from ECO and explored the many rocks to tie into our next science unit which focuses on rocks and the ways they are similar and different and how they may change over time.

Nora McDonough, our art teacher, has shared the following links from her blog, which highlight some of the kindergarten art work.

http://waitsfieldart.blogspot.com/2014/10/kindergarten-nighttime-adventures.html

http://waitsfieldart.blogspot.com/2014/11/harvest-bean-mandalas.html

Decomposer tag.

Running through the seeds.

Rock art.

We had another fantastic and thankfully dry ECO day.  Our focus was on fire building.  Ask your child to tell you about the three kinds of sticks we used to make our fire.