The Final Blog of First Semester

Greeting parents,

“Today you are YOU, that is truer than true. There is NO ONE alive that is YOUER than YOU!” A beautiful quote by one of our groups favorite book author Dr. Sues, as it is very important in our school to teach children to be themselves and love themselves.

Being surrounded by children and spending a whole day with them is like being in a beautiful paradise that is how we teachers feel throughout our teaching experience. It has been truly amazing semester, we are more than happy with the progress our group have accomplished and all the good memories we get to keep in our heart. We wish all the students that will not come back all the greatest things and are hopeful to see some of our friends back soon. Here is our semester overall exploration,

Our Large Group over the Semester

Calendar: from the beginning of the school month August to our last month December, it has been so much fun exploring with the calendar. It helped our group to count and identify single and double digit numbers, days of the week, month of the year, date, year, season, weather, sounds of letter and many more.

Caterpillar: from our first number 1 to our last number 88, our caterpillar was/is part of large group that we have fun exploring. It is part of math concept that helped our group to count, identify single and double digit numbers, shape, pattern and writing.

Circle Time: our circle time has been always the time were our students, expressed their imagination, feeling, ideas and questions. Circle time helped our group to develop their communication, vocabularies and language.

Book corner: books are not only for enjoyment but also part of literacy that expose our group to literacy. They loved exploring with different books and that helped our group in communication and recalling as we always ask them questions like, “What do you think will happen next”, “Which word rhymes?”, “What do you understand from the story?” and so many different questions that helps them to develop many literacy skills.

Board Message: our board message questions included, Math, Literacy, Science, guessing questions, and social studies.

Sight Words: our students explored with different sight words and also helped to make a sentence by outing the words.

Zoo-Phonics: our exploration with letters started with Zoo-Phonics. It is really good to see the change our group made in identifying and sounding out letters.

Our Small group over the Semester

Math: over the semester we have tried to touch many mathematical topics. We have explored with,

o Numbers: our number exploration included, counting, writing and number identification. We started with single digit and moved to double digits shortly. Our caterpillar helped us in writing numbers during large group.

o Operations: this semester we explored with Addition and subtraction. The topic stared with the story telling for them to understand the concept very well and explored with different worksheets.

o Shapes: the other fun exploration we had this semester was about shapes. We started the concept with hunting different 2D shapes inside and outside our classroom. We moved to 3D and their components afterwards.

Literacy: as you all know we have started our literacy activity soon as the school started. Our activities included,

· Zoo-Phonics: sounds of letters helps children to develop reading simple words to simple sentence. Our groups have developed the skill in a very admirable way.

· Journal: children can express their want and need through drawing. In this semester, Journal was part of literacy session. Our groups have developed their drawing skill, communication, language, and vocabularies.

· Spelling: after exploring with Zoo-Phonics for many sessions, spelling CVC words have become very simple for them.

· Rhyming Words: “The cat and the Hat” was one of our inspirations to rhyming words. We have explored with different CVC rhyming words, matching activities and worksheets.

· Writing: after exploring with different tracing practice, we finished our semester with writing concept.

Science: children are curious of their surroundings. Science can be able to answer many of their questions by experimenting, observing and making their own conclusion. Some of the science activities w explored during this semester,

Ø Natural materials: most of our activities are inspired by the children interest. Classification of natural materials was our first science experience.

Ø Gardening: it was one of fun activity we did. We planted different seeds and it helped our children to make prediction, experiment, collect data, and take care of their own environment.

Ø Habitats: books can inspire children to know more about their world. Habitat first came to our group from a book called ‘Our World’ and we have explored with different animals and habitats.

Ø Weather and season: as children see weather change, they began to question “How”. During this semester, we were able to explore with the different type of weather and seasons.

Social Studies: our long and fun exploration this semester is our exploration about “Where are you from?” Some of the exploration of social studies,

§ “Who are you”: we started our topic of social studies from ourselves. Since everything start from oneself, our groups introduced themselves and their family to their class friends.

§ “Where are you from”: after our exploration from self, we moved to a bigger scale that took us many session times and helped us to touch many areas. We have explored with Countries our group from, continents, ocean, flags, and island.

§ Transportation: as one activity can lead us to another, the concept of transportation was related to our map exploration. We have covered many means of transportation and classified different equipment’s that we used, in Air, Land, and Water.

Physical Exercise: children and movement are inseparable. There are many areas children can develop from play; our cooperative games included many activities that helped many our student in gross and fine motor skills, communication, vocabularies and many learning areas. Throughout the semester we have played many games and explored with many hard courses that seems hard in our eyes but very simple to students.

Miraf Hailu,

Elisabeth Michael and,

Lily Aron

Pre-K and Kindergarten Team!