The Learning Bin

The b bells were not as successful as I had hoped.  The transposition of the letter happened for most of the children in the class, and the idea of a ringing bell wasn't something that was part of their reality.  For next time around I'm thinking of doing a /b/ with bat wings.

There was a great deal of excitement about my birthday in the classroom, so I promised the class a treat. First we observed 3 different cookies: Then we made notes on our observations. After that we tasted and picked our favorites: The three flavored in order were: 1. Molasses buckwheat 2. Oatmeal strawberry 3. Carmel chocolate chip And with a tie breaking vote from the principal the grand winner is the molasses buckwheat!

This year the learning standards for my PK class include both upper and lower case letter identification.  Usually in the past I have focused on one or the other depending on if I was teacher Handwriting Without Tears or Jolly Phonics.  So after the success of the upper case letter collages, I began our fourth spiral of the alphabet with lower case letters.  For reference sake the first spiral was using the Starfall curriculum and their web resources (starfall.com), the second spiral was the upper case alphabet collage book, the third pass was working on our upper case letter writing using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, and now enter our fourth spiral: 

What would the world be like without beauty such as this? Think twice before using products with palm oil in them, because places like this are disappearing in favor of palm plantations. Stop buying these products and the cutting of jungle will not be profitable. Location: Tesso Nilo National Park, Sumatra Indonesia

If you are patient and thoughtful, the small and beautiful bits of our world will take notice.

Rounding out our alphabet and our animal unit with Z Zebras! The class has done a beautiful job with the upper case alphabet. Next we're moving on to the lower case letters. A note on academic impact: after doing these art collages the class has near 100% mastery on naming upper case letters. Only one child continues to need support with upper case letter. Success!

What could be more fun than Yak horns? This fit it wonderfully with our animal unit and we learned some fun fact about yaks. The kiddos were most intrigued by the idea of drinking yak's milk, but unfortunately we don't live in a place where we could get any!