Our Adventures Continue

Last week was full of learning as usual! We developed understanding of the five senses and how they connect to each other through a variety of experiences. Here are some of our favorites:

Texture Walk:  We learned the term 'texture' as we examined how things feel. We realized that our sense of touch can tell us lots about our world. We went on a texture walk around the school to explore and develop this new vocabulary. We realized that you can both feel and see textures if you look closely enough. This was followed with a discussion about safety in regard to our sense of touch. How does our sense of touch work with our other senses to keep us safe?

 

What's inside the balloon?: We learned that scientists hypothesize and record ideas - and do so by using their five senses. We practiced this skill by each hypothesizing what was inside nine different balloons. Using our previous experiences and sense of touch, we recorded our hypotheses in our Unit of Inquiry books. We even tried our best to label like scientists! We then matched each balloon to a picture of what was inside. We shared how our previous experiences (or lack there of) with the different substances inside helped us identify (or not identify) the correct filling. Throughout this activity we used our newly acquired vocabulary of textures.

How does our sense of hearing work?: We spent some time outside recording all the sounds we heard. We noticed that most of the time we did not need our sense of sight to identify what each sound was.  

 

Ruth noticed that a group of students sounded much louder when they were on the stairs near us than they did when they were above on the rooftop playground.  So how was it that we were able to hear all the different sounds, and what made some sounds louder than others? We explored this question by clapping in a variety of places:

Our claps weren't very loud when we were on the big field.

 

Our claps were a little louder when we were on the playground.

  Our claps were loudest when we were in the breezeway.

We learned that noises produce sound waves that our ears capture. Richard shared his "ah-hah" moment when he stated that the waves must sound louder in the places that can capture the waves. Bravo! This led to a discussion about sound waves 'bouncing off' hard objects. Of course our claps weren't as loud on the big field because the waves were not contained!

Do we all perceive things the same?: Throughout our Unit on the senses we have begun to realize that our brains each recall different experiences associated with senses that can bring forth different emotions. We began exploring this idea by reading the book Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg. We saw that the ants in the book had a much different perspective than us on the things they saw. We examined this in more detail by using iPods to take pictures of things from our point of view, and then again from the point of view of an ant (very close up). We realized that if we look very closely we may see things we never even noticed!

 

 We will continue this concept of perception and perspectives this week as we examine our sense of smell. The brain associates smells most closely with memories. We will explore why this is.

You can help your child explore at home as well by providing opportunities to explore using the five senses.

Happy Birthday Connor!

We celebrated Connor's 6th birthday today! We all had nice things to say in a card for him. Happy Birthday Connor!

Senses Language

Dear KG Families,

Our students have begun their first Unit of Inquiry in kindergarten, which is all about the five senses.  From a language perspective, it is important to build understanding in a student’s first language as well as English.  Please have a look at some of the words your child might see and hear in this Unit. 

We encourage you to discuss a few of these words each night with your child in your family’s strongest language, (Bangla, Korean, Swedish, etc.) especially in context like cooking and having dinner. Your child will not be tested on these terms, so please talk about them naturally with your child in a non-stressful way. Even if your child is a native English speaker, it is important to discuss these terms as we study them throughout the unit. Your child’s first language development is very important because it helps your child increase his/her conceptual understanding and build his/her English language skills.

We hope they will enjoy this Unit of Inquiry: Who We Are, The Five Senses. Our central idea for this Unit is “Sensory information can help us explore our world and develop new understandings about ourselves.” Please encourage your child to share thoughts, ideas and questions with you at home to enhance and expand learning, and to further explore the amazing world we live in.

Sincerely,

The Kindergarten Team

senses	feel	sound	sweet
see	eyes	noise	salty
sight	ears	quiet	bitter
hear	nose	loud	hard
listen	hands	hot	soft
smell	fingers	cold	smooth
taste	mouth	spicy	bumpy
touch	tongue	sour	rough

This list does not suggest all of the words you might talk about with your child, so feel free to discuss other words that may apply.

We Can Write!

"I went to get my nails done."

In the matter of just a few weeks we have begun seeing ourselves as writers! We have learned that we all have stories to share and information to teach to others. Pictures tell stories, and as we are developing our understanding of what it means to communicate we are making our pictures more detailed and interesting. We are also beginning to add writing to our work so that others can read our stories more clearly. Mayalou's work above demonstrates the use of one of our new learned reading and writing strategies: Stretchy Snake. She stretched out each word and identified which letter corresponded to the sound. As the year continues and we begin to learn more about the English language we will learn more spelling rules and writing conventions, but at this point we are trying our best to write the sounds we hear. If we get stuck we know to say to ourselves, "We'll try our best and forget the rest." We can't wait to continue on our journey as authors.

What Do You Feel?

We explored our sense of touch today. Thirty objects were placed inside a box. We had to use our sense of touch to find particular objects before our partners found them. We found that this was kind of hard and really required us to focus and think about what each object might feel like. We will continue to explore our sense of touch and how it works with our other senses next week.