India!

I hope you all got a chance to see your child's artwork on display at Traditions!  Such beautiful elephants of India!  And it was so much fun walking in the Procession of the Species together! 

Math
Measurement and fractions have been our focus the last couple of weeks. We played with finding the perimeter and area of shapes that we made on our geoboards.  We have measured so many things!  We found parts of our body that are an inch, 6 inches and a foot and then tried to find things around our room that had the same measurements.  The ruler had become a favorite tool in the classroom these days!

We have been using our pattern blocks, cuisinaire rods, food, our body and measuring cups with rice to help us understand fractions.  We are focusing on when a whole is fractioned into equal, fair pieces.  We have played with adding fractions by making a recipe and doubling or even tripling the recipe.   We played with subtracting fractions by eating parts of a cookie we cut into fractions. Math can be so yummy!

Literacy
We have been working on our ending blends, such as -mp, -nk, and -nd.  We had to give -nk and-ng special attention as when they babysit baby "i" and "a" they think they are such the cutest babies ever and pick them up, which changes our baby sounds!  "I" will say "eeee" and "a"will say "ay."

In reading workshop, we have practiced the reading strategy of flipping the vowel sound to help us read a word.  Sometimes when we sound out a word we end up with a nonsense word, but if we flip the sound (either make the vowel long or short) we may find that we make a word!

Compound words have been fun to play with as we create bigger words with two smaller words.  Check out our wall of illustrated compound words!

Theme
We are in love with the elephants of India!  It has been interesting to learn a bit about the Indian elephants and how they are different from African elephants.  We read that the Indian elephant's ear is a lot like the shape of India - we thought that was a really neat fact!

We were so lucky to have a visit from Liv Monroe who lived in India for six months and had so many wonderful things to share with us.  We learned about what men and women wear and the differences in various parts of India.  We even got to try on a beautiful sari!  After sharing her slides and dishes from India, she showed us the trick of eating rice with our hands - there is a trick to it!

We have begun to learn a bit about Hinduism since 3/4 of the population are Hindu.  Check out our beautiful OM symbols on our door.  We enjoyed hearing the story of Ganesh and seeing the pictures of Shiva, Parvati and some of the other gods.

We have also learned a few facts about the Taj Mahal.  Check out our incredible drawings as we kept in mind the symmetry and shapes of this beautiful palace.  We then took our artistic liberty in coloring it in vibrant colors that we liked (thinking about using shades of one color or two or adding on a contrasting accent color).

Yoga - A note from Lisa!
We usually spend the first hour practicing our breathing poses to help relax our amygdala's or energize our brains, then we work on our yoga poses. Typically we start our routine together and then the kids put together a yoga story uses poses of their choice and present their stories to the group while they lead us through the routine/story they put together. The second hour is usually spent focusing on kindness and optimism. We often read a book and discuss the lessons learned then spend some time journaling and finish up with final relaxation and meditation.