Mrs. Rachel's Kinder Prep: Mittens, Hats, and Hedgehogs

We had a great first week back after Christmas break! Everyone was very excited to see their friends and get back to work. We spent this week learning through fun activities that went along with Jan Brett books. If you aren't familiar with this author, she has written a variety of fantastic children's books with wonderful illustrations (some of my favorites). The stories we focused on were The Mitten, The Hat, and The Umbrella. We also read Honey, Honey, Lion and Noah's Ark.

To go along with the story The Mitten, we enjoyed doing a variety of "mitten" activities. Our literacy activities included identifying the initial sounds of the animals in the story, reading our own "Mitten" sight word book, using a mitten paper bag craft to sequence the characters in the story with ordinal numbers, and also working on our reading fluency with our weekly poem, "The Mitten". Make sure to practice reading these with your child this week. (They are both in your child's reading folder.) We also went ahead and did our journal entry for January by writing what could fit inside our mittens!

We also used this story to have some fun...practicing our lacing skills by lacing mittens, putting mittens in size order on our magnet board, and seeing how many little animals we could fit inside our mittens.

Everyone was extra creative this week! We are getting very good at working on multi-step projects independently. One of these independent projects was painting a hedgehog craft with forks and Q-tips! We also made a cute umbrella independently to go along with the story The Umbrella. We even got to do a fun science experiment with our mittens to see if ice cubes melt faster in our bare hands or with a mitten on...Brrrr!!

Our Bible focus this month is on Jesus' miracles during his time on Earth. We did the story of Jesus changing water to wine. We started working on our verse of the month: "With God, all things are possible!" (Matt. 19:26)

We started working on our last names some this week. Next week, we will begin working on our addresses and phone numbers! We are getting so smart!

This week, see if your child can...

1. Tell you January's Bible verse.
2. Identify number 11 (this week's number).
3. Write a few sentences that include some of these sight words: I, see, the, a, is.
4. Count to 50 with you.
5. Cut out the shape of a hat or mitten with scissors.