Ingenuity In Kindergarten

Our "Science Lab" MGT curriculum box arrived last week, and was brought to me upstairs in the kindergarten classroom. My kindergarteners experienced Mother Goose Time for the last 1/2 of their Pre-K year, but this year there is a different K curriculum. Let's just say it's slightly less exciting than MGT, but I at least try to stick with similar themes.

Since the box was brought the K room, they wanted me to open to see what was inside. One student asked in a rather forlorn little voice,"Do we get to do those projects, too?" How could I say no??!! I pulled out the story book of the month, entitled Ingenuity, which is all about famous scientists and inventors. It happened to fit perfectly with our theme of "Jobs People Do", so we read the first section all about Isaac Newton and the Laws of Motion.

One of my main objectives for the kindergarten class is to foster of love of writing, so they write almost daily in their journals about various relevant topics. I decided this would be a good month to use the Little Journals for the K class. They designed the cover of their journals and wrote a sentence about what kind of scientist they would want to be. I played the Science Lab CD while they worked, and they were quite surprised to hear some familiar songs from previous MGT themes.

"If I were a scientist, I would be a mathematician teacher."

"If I were a scientist, I would be a structural engineer." 

"If I were a scientist, I would  be a botanist."

We tested out the Laws of Motion using toy cars in a variety of shapes, sizes, and weights. They made some very insightful observations. I threw in some funny (but informative) youtube videos, which is always a crowd pleaser.

I love that MGT is flexible and practical for different ages and learning levels. Seeing my students get excited about exploring new and complex ideas is why I do what I do! I'm looking forward to seeing their own ingenuity throughout this month.

The Evolution Of A Fairy Tale

W is for the big, bad, WOLF. 

Today we read the story of the Three Little Pigs, illustrated with the story pieces provided by MGT. After I read the story, I set out 3 different types of building materials and sent a couple children in search of the appropriate characters from our bin of tiny animals. They found a wolf, but no pigs. There are a dozen whales of varying species, but not a pig to be had...Go figure. We did, however, come up with three tiny pink rubber ducks, which were deemed reasonable substitutes.

I left them to build the houses on the floor and act out the story as they were so inclined. Seeveral students decided to move to the table and use the story pieces to reenact the story, which ended up being told half in Japanese and half in English.

I fully expected them to be ready for something new after 20 minutes, and I was actually looking forward myself to playing the roll-a-cube seek and find game that was also part of today's lesson. However, they were totally invested in working together to build the "scenery" a retell the story together for a solid 45 minutes until lunch time.

There was some disagreements about chimney placement, as would be expected among wolves and pigs (or pink ducks), but overall they worked cooperatively and had SO much fun.

The "big bad wolf howling in the forest 

Building the house of "straw"

Building the house of sticks

"I'll huff, and I'll puff and I'll BLOW your house down!"

The Three pink ducks are safe in the "brick" house

And they all lived happily ever after...THE END

R Is for Rattle, And R is for...RUN!!

We're back from summer break and after a couple days of getting re-acclimated to the school routine and sharing about all our adventures, they were ready to learn about more animals with Mother Goose Time!

We have slowly be adding to our "Wall of Animals" (daily topic posters) since we started on the A-Zoo Animals theme, and they frequently refer back to it throughout the school day. They also notice quickly if a poster has fallen, and are able to identify the letter that's missing.

Rattlesnake day was really fun! My students love the song on the music theme CD! Since my CD player is labeled in Japanese, and I have no idea how to set it to repeat a certain track number, I spent the better part of free play time standing beside the CD player so I could hit rewind and play repeatedly as soon as the song ended.

We played an auditory discrimination game with the eggs from the previous day's lesson. I filled them with a variety of tiny objects I from our collection of sensory items. It was quite challenging for them, and some of them gave up trying to match the eggs and just shook them to the rhythm of the music, which was totally fine.

They were super excited about making the rattlesnakes with beads and pipe cleaners. I loved their creativity. Some had "baby" snakes, and others had "Mommy" snakes with no rattle on the tail. Some designed very detailed patterns, and others just used as much pink as possible. LOL.

  

 

It's all fun and games until you hear the rattle...then you better RUN!!