The Kindergarten Connection: SVS Team!: January 16-19, 2024

Wonderful Winter
This week we went on a winter walk. We discovered so many interesting and exciting things like seeing our breath in the cold air, hearing the snow crunch under our boots, finding animal tracks in the snow, and tasting tiny snowflakes from the sky that landed on our tongues.

We are very interested in learning about animals in winter and where they live. We began looking into these questions using the stories "Over and Under the Snow' by Kate Messner and "Animals in Winter" by Henrietta Bancroft.

Students coloured a hill in their visual journal and put cotton balls for the snow. They added winter trees and pictures of animals who might live under the snow and over the snow.

Students also chose a winter animal to learn more about. They drew their animal and placed it on the class bulletin board either over or under the snow depending where it lives in winter. Our bulletin board needs a few tunnels for the animals that go under the snow! Check back next week to see the final scene!

In math, we continued to work on verbally expressing our math knowledge by playing "What Doesn't Belong?" All answers are correct if you can explain which picture does NOT belong and why. Try it out with your child!

This month students will begin representing numbers using pictures, tally marks, ten frames, dice and blocks. This skill will continued to be practiced for numbers up to 10. Try making it a game with your child. Ask them to show a number between 1-10 on their fingers and then try showing the number in different ways using their fingers again or objects around your home.

In music, we explored the sounds and feelings of winter in Vivaldi's famous concerto "Winter" (L'inverno) I:Allegro non molto from "The Four Seasons". It was composed in 1723 more than 300 years ago. Enjoy a clip from the Arctic Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra with the beauty of the music and the backgrounds of winter scenery. Grab a scarf for you and your child and dance and swirl to the snowflakes of the music.