February 20

Hello Families:

I apologize for my delay in writing a new post. February has been quite a busy month for us in kindergarten. It was wonderful to see you all at conferences on February 7 and 8. I was so proud to share each student's growth with you.

Thank you to those families who came to the Lincoln Center Family Spaghetti Dinner and Silent Auction on February 3. The students will benefit tremendously from your donations through new books, technology equipment and other various learning materials.

We had a blast celebrating Valentine's Day together on February 14th. We talked a lot about friendships and celebrating each others presence in our lives. Making valentines gave us great practice with writing our names and our friend's names.
We were also very excited to celebrate the 100th day of kindergarten. This day was a great day of pride in our academic growth. We had so much fun visiting each kindergarten classroom and participating in seven different 100's day activities:

• making 100's day crowns
• rolling dice to 100 on a 100's grid
• finding/recognizing numbers on a 100's grid that we could color in to make 100
• reading stories about 100's day
• writing about what we will do when we turn 100
• drawing what we will look like at 100
• drawing what foods we could eat 100 of

Here we are 100 days smarter:

Another fun activity that we like to do during reading time is to take white boards and practice writing the words we can read from the books in our book boxes. I think we could sit all day and practice reading and writing on whiteboards. Look at our beautiful handwriting!


Stay tuned for upcoming reminders about our field trip to Warner Nature Center on March 1 and 2. Enjoy an extra day of snowy fun at home--remember there is no school for students no February 21 because of Staff Development.

February 6

Welcome to February. We have been so busy in kindergarten. We started our new PYP unit on weather. Earlier this week we had so much fun learning about the four types of clouds. We read Eric Carle's book called LITTLE CLOUD about a cloud who loved to change its shape. We made our own little clouds with cotton balls. By the end of the project our fingers were really sticky!



On Friday the entire kindergarten went on a field trip to Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis for their Kinder Konzerts education program. When we got there, we got to take a tour of the big stage that the musicians play on each night. We listened to several musicians introduce their instruments to us. We compared and contrasted their different sounds before listening to a story without words---just music. We were not allowed to take pictures while we were on stage, but check out the many instruments we listened to:


Can you name all of these instruments and remember which group they belong to?

Once we finished listening to the musicians play for us, we went to the "Sound Factory." We learned the musical terms for fast and slow...presto and largo. We compared these terms to a rabbit and a tortoise. We listened to fast and slow pieces of music and waved our musical streamers like we were conducting our own orchestra:

We also got a chance to play several instruments ourselves like the violin, cello, snare drum, and several different sounding percussion instruments:


At the very end we listened to several pieces of music that were fast and slow. We moved the parachute up and down to the beat of the piece--and used motions that were presto and largo. This might have been our favorite part, and a great way to end our day: