January 12-16, 2015

Welcome back to school and Happy New Year. Hope everyone had a well-deserved holiday with family, relatives and friends. We are so happy to welcome the Gagnes to our classroom family.

We started the first week of school in 2015 with an unfamiliar situation, especially for the kids. By the end of December 2014, a student in Pre-K 3 class only had to share and take turns with the other 5 students, but when we start the first week back in January 2015, each student instantly need to share and take turns with the other 25 students with the Pre-K 3 and 4 classes combined. "Too many peoples," Camilla said :) I really appreciate all support and understanding from parents in both classes during this unexpected situation. I also have noticed that some parents did a terrific job in doing pre and post conversations with the kids at home about our current situation. Please excuse me for the inconvenience and the not on purpose pushing, bumping, kicking and other physical contacts between the kids. We will try our best to minimize them. Please continue your support and understanding to this situation for maybe another week.

Other than having a lot of students in one class, all the kids enjoyed all the class activities that we did this week. We had our first week out of three weeks planned to discuss about our five senses, with sense of hearing was chosen to be the first one.

We had some special guests visiting our class last Tuesday. They are Dinda, Fatah, Ms. Ade and Ms. Susana from Sekolah Luar Biasa (SLB) Tunas Bangsa Balikpapan. Both Dinda and Fatah are not able to hear since they were born. Currently, Dinda studies in grade 8 while Fatah is in grade 4.  They were so kind teaching us how to use sign language as other way to communicate especially to and with those who are unfortunately cannot use their senses of hearing as normal people do. The kids learned how to sign the alphabets and some simple words. We also learned to sing and sign some songs. Stay tuned for our performance at the assembly by the end of Five Senses unit. 

We love doing art. This week, we did bell and marble painting. The kids love listening to the bells tingling when they painted at the painting easel. They also love the sound made by the marbles running around inside the tub when we did the marble painting.

To explore the sense of hearing, we also did other activities such as sorting the bells into different colors, playing percussions using every day objects that we can easily find in the kitchen, doing sound counting, cutting different type of materials and listening to the sound they made, walking around the ridge to do a sound safari, and playing different games that help us explore our sense of hearing even more.

We used popcorn as our first five senses observation object. When the popcorn popped in the microwave, the kids listened carefully to any sound that they could hear. They all agreed that they heard the sound POP. As soon as the popcorn went out of the microwave, they described the smell of butter and honey. Then they used the sense of sight to observe the shape of the popcorn. Some of them said that it looked like cloud, but some other thought that it looked like Mickey Mouse's head. When they touched and felt the popcorn, they described it as bumpy and soft. When they were finally able to do further investigation on the popcorn using the senses of taste, they had one same opinion about it, it's yummy!

For Language Arts and Literacy, Pre-K 3 students continued their letter of the week routines such as tracing letter using Wet-Dry-Try! app, tracing letter on the worksheet, doing Endless Alphabets app, and doing craft project related to letter of the week. Two additional activities were introduced at the beginning of this week. To help the kids recognizing their names and also their classmates' names, the kids are introduced to Name Book and Touch Write app activities. Each kid has their own Name Book with some different name writing stages. This week the kids started the first stage which is tracing the letters in their names twice a day. To support this activity, we also used Touch Write app on iPad which enables kids to trace not only their names, but also their classmates' names.