Holidays Around the World

I am sure that by now you've heard about our whirlwind trip around the world with our pal, Globe Trot Scott, as we learned all about holiday traditions around the world. Scott, our tour guide, sent us a package each day filled with information and souvenirs to help us become familiar with the holiday customs and beliefs of different cultures.

The package that Globe Trot Scott sent to us from each country.

Our passport with our information and a page for each country that we learned about.

We learned about the winter holidays in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, England, Russia, Australia, Israel and finished with sharing the traditions of our own families here in America. For each country, we read a traditional holiday story, read an informational text about holiday practices for that country, and we made a craft to help us remember each country. We even had some special guests visit to teach us about their families' traditions.

Violet's mom, Ashley, dressed up as La Befana and taught us about holiday traditions in Italy.

Mrs. Archer, the school secretary, shared artifacts from Sweden and taught us about the holiday traditions there. 

Traditional Swedish decorations.

Take a look at our crafts here:

A traditional note left inside a napkin in Italy.

A poinsettia flower, a symbol of the holidays in Mexico.

Eli models his crown for St. Lucia Day in Sweden.

Gingerbread ornaments are traditional in Germany.

A sandman (since Australia doesn't have snow at this time of year!)

A Russian Matryoshka doll. 

We also spent time during the month of December practicing for our Kindergarten Holiday Sing-A-Long. Thank you to everyone who attended the show! The students were so excited and proud of their hard work (and they looked absolutely adorable!)

This month has been full of wonderful learning and special activities. One of our favorites was Polar Express Day! We got to wear our pajamas and enjoy the classic story of The Polar Express. We also enjoyed some yummy homemade hot cocoa and popcorn as we watched the movie.

We spent time on Friday before vacation learning about reindeer. We read the story of the most famous reindeer of all (Rudolph, of course!) and also read an informational text about reindeer and compared and contrasted the two. We even turned ourselves into reindeer!

Friday afternoon was filled with another sing-a-long and our class celebration. Thank you to everyone for making this extra special for our class! We had so much fun together!

 I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing holiday spent with family and friends! As wonderful as vacation was, I was thrilled to get back to my favorite kindergartners to continue our learning and fun together!

Spider Facts

As a culminating activity for our spiders unit, we each wrote and illustrated a spider fact. They are compiled here in this photo story. Enjoy!

Spiders

This year, the kindergarten team decided to use Halloween week as an opportunity to delve into a science unit all about spiders. Students were able to engage with this unit as readers, writers, mathematicians, artists, scientists, and deep thinkers.

We kicked off our unit by answering the question "are you afraid of spiders?" Surprisingly, most students said no! We analyzed our data and tied it into our math learning of using tally marks and comparing quantities.

We also read a short passage about spiders each day and did several "close reading" activities. We examined important vocabulary terms from the passage, labeled the parts of a spider, engaged in a small group activity where we designed the perfect spider web, and, finally, wrote and illustrated a spider fact.

We did several spider art projects, including designing our own glittery spider webs and making spooky spider hats!

We read the book Aaaarrgghh! Spider by Lydia Monks during our spider week. This cute story is all about a little spider who wants to be somebody's pet. We decided whether we thought a spider would make a good pet and then did some opinion writing about this topic.

 

Spider poems we read throughout the week.

Eli and his family were able to catch two cool looking spiders to bring in for observation at our science table. This was so exciting for the students!
 

At the end of our spider week, one student declared, "I used to think spiders were scary, but now I think they are really interesting!" I couldn't agree more!

Pumpkins

Our weeklong investigation of pumpkins was so much fun and resulted in many hands-on learning opportunities. We started our unit with a trip to the Parker Family Pumpkin Patch, where we learned about the pumpkin growing process, visited the fields where the pumpkins grow, and tried some yummy pumpkin foods.

Acting out the pumpkin life cycle.

Exploring various types of pumpkins.

Tasting pumpkin applesauce. Yum!

Enjoying pumpkin dip!

A class full of pumpkins!

Throughout the week, we were able to engage in a variety of activities to further our learning about pumpkins. In addition to reading many pumpkin stories and informational texts, students used the pumpkins that they brought back from the pumpkin patch to be scientists and answer various questions about them. We also observed our class pumpkin and drew representations of the pumpkin for our science notebooks. We then estimated how many seeds were in this pumpkin and then worked very hard to count them all!

Eliza measures how many links around her pumpkin is.

Eli investigates whether his pumpkin floats or sinks.

Rian and Violet investigate their pumpkins.

We read this book before estimating how many seeds were in our class pumpkin.

Our estimates.

Counting pumpkin seeds on tens frames!

Exploring the inside of our class pumpkin at the science table.

We listened to this book at the listening center and then drew and wrote about our favorite part.

Violet practices pointing to the words in her Pumpkin Lifecycle book.

Allyson hunts for letters at this pumpkin-themed station.

Eli plays the Pumpkin Syllables game during literacy centers.

We concluded our unit by sequencing the life cycle of a pumpkin and summarizing all that we learned during the unit. I wonder if anyone will be eating some pumpkin pie in a few short weeks?!