Welcome to Kindergarten @ Friends School Haverford

A warm greeting and enthusiastic welcome to the 2012-2013 kindergarten class at Friends School Haverford!  Kindergarten will be an amazing journey for each of you and we hope, for parents and members of the extended family, too! Through the hands, hearts, and minds of your children and their experiences this year we hope you too will reconnect with nature more deeply,  relate with a renewed sense of playfulness in your lives, and be inspired by a sense of wonder wherever it may find you. 

We invite you to visit our blog for the stories, photos, and videos of our experiences together this year.  Photos will be added to a growing collection of slideshows found on the front of the blog in unedited, chronological order.  For a larger view of the slideshow or to download photos to your own computer, please double click on the slideshow bars to gain direct access to my Picasa Web Albums.

The slideshows to the right that feature photos from the first 8 days of kindergarten include:

2012-2013 Monarchs & Migration
2012-2013 Gardening with Kindergarten
2012-2013 First Days of Kindergarten
2012-2013 Kindergarten in Action!

We hope you are as excited as we are to begin the kindergarten year! 

Cheers,
Tr. Ann

Kindergarten learns about the water cycle and explores Mill Creek

If you were a drop of water, what would you do? Where would you go? How would you get there? Would you float about the earth in cloud? Would you hang out in a body of water such as a puddle, pond, lake, or ocean? Would you splash your way down a mountainside or through a valley with the help of a creek, a stream, or a river? Would you rest in the soil, quench the thirst of an animal, or become part of a plant as it grows? Would you precipitate? Turn to gas and evaporate? Perhaps you would do all of these things...

Tr. Lindsay read to us today about the water cycle and helped us play a bead-stringing game as we pretended to be drops of water moving through the water cycle. As we moved from one place to another, we had to roll a die to determine our destinations. As we moved from place to place according to the roll of the die we added a bead to our string from each destination visited. At the end of the game our string of multicolored beads was a visual representation of the story of our journey through the water cycle.

After that, it was off to the stream with our parent volunteers. We navigated our way upstream over rocks to an area with large puddles and shallow moving water. There we flipped over rocks and scooped up water looking for living creatures in the water. How lucky we were to see tadpoles today in addition to a few snails and mysterious creepy crawlies that moved too quickly to be captured and identified! Tr. Lindsay set up microscopes for us to magnify things we collected for a closer look; magnifying boxes were great for holding tadpoles while we looked for the appearance of emerging body parts.

The field trip stimulated our senses with the colors, textures, and sounds of the forest, challenged our physical bodies as we crawled over a fallen tree and scrambled over slippery rocks in the stream, filled our lungs with fresh air, and danced under a canopy of trees. Beneath cloudy skies and intermittent raindrops from the trees above, we stretched our minds to think about how water moves over land, changes form, and is a part of all living things. 

A warm thank you to our parent volunteers for joining us  today!

Kindergarten Newsflash!

On Friday, February 24, kindergarten received a wonderful surprise! A package arrived from American School Foundation's kindergarten class and Tr. Erin in Mexico City.

A few months ago our kindergarten class made a friendship book for David to give as a gift to his cousin Natalie's kindergarten class at American School Foundation in Mexico City when he and his family traveled to Mexico over winter break. FSH kindergarten was excited about David's trip because of all the many wonderful connections we've made to Mexico this year as we've journeyed to Mexico "on the wings of the monarchs."

It's not often that a kindergarten classmate has an opportunity to take on the role of an ambassador of friendship from one school to another but that is exactly what David did! David visited Tr. Erin's kindergarten, greeted the kindergartners, and presented our friendship book to the class.

Upon his return to Pennsylvania, David worked on a slideshow about his trip to Mexico City and his visit to ASF. For Treasures Sharing one day, David and his dad showed us the slideshow and digital book about their trip to Mexico.

We found out that David's visit and our class' book of friendship inspired Tr. Erin and her class to make a book for our class. We were so excited to open the package when it finally arrived that we came in early from outdoor play to open it together.


When we opened it last Friday we took a "first look" at the book and read a short note Tr. Erin had enclosed. Yesterday we read the book, looked at the photos of the children, and studied the details of the children's drawings.

Tr. Erin's class wrote about things they like to do and as we read the book aloud page by page, FSH kindergartners got very, very excited. FSH kindergartners discovered that they like to do the same kinds of things the children at ASF do!

As the kindergartners made a connection with each child and his/her page in the book, the miles between ASF and FSH seemed to magically disappear. By the end of the book we decided that if we were to meet and play with one another, we would definitely get along and have a lot of fun.

However, as long as there are thousands of miles between our two classrooms and schools we decided, we will have to figure out other ways of being friends. Teacher Erin and Teacher Ann are already emailing to make plans for ASF and FSH kindergarten classes to chat via Skype from our classrooms next week!

Stay tuned for updates!

Emerging curriculum: What is a rock? a crystal? a mineral?

Four kindergartners presented "clipboard research" to the class today. During booklook a few weeks ago Danny, David, James, and Aidan began studying several non-fiction books in our classroom on rocks, crystals, and minerals. They marked favorite pages with book marks and made drawings on their clipboards about their interests. The four of them and I met last week to develop ideas on the topic to share with the class. Today they shared their ideas and invited others to join in with clipboard research of their own! Our research is supported with two bins of books that our research team signed out from the library . We have books about rocks, crystals, minerals, volcanoes, snowflakes, and fossils.





Mason took the initiative to bring his rock collection to school for Treasures Sharing. He introduced every rock to us and described the textures, colors, and shapes of the rocks in his collection with gusto. He talked to us about how he started his rock collection by looking for rocks himself, receiving them as gifts, and visiting places and buying them where they are for sale. Later on the playground Mason demonstrated how to start a rock collection by looking for rocks. He started a rock collection with Matthew in an empty egg carton.





One of our project ideas is to find out about crystals by "growing" one of our own. We researched "growing your own sugar crystal" on the internet. We found a recipe that matched the illustrations in one of our books. The class watched the video and then worked in small groups to make sugar syrup for the cyrstal project.


Add 3 cups sugar....



....to one cup of water. Mix until dissolved and heat to a rolling boil. (Teacher Ann did this part for us on the stove!)



Add a few drops of food color to change the bland sugar water to a beautiful rose-colored syrup...


...and pour it into a large jar. We are growing our sugar crystals on skewers and will be checking them everyday through the transparent sides of the jar. It is fun to imagine the crystals that will form over the next two weeks! We wonder what they will look like and taste like. Stay tuned for updates!

Our First Field Trip 11.11.11

A field trip holds many delights for kindergartners. From the bus ride to the fun of being outdoors in the natural classroom with Tr. Lindsay under beautifully blue skies, there was something new at every turn. Eating snack outdoors and playing a fast-paced game of Shadow Tag added something special to the morning, too.

With Tr. Lindsay leading, we hiked on meandering paths and stopped occasionally under trees to search the ground for leaves and seeds. We kept an eye open for various colors and shapes of fall leaves as we hiked. We found many things to pick up and look at along the way including robust earthworms hiding under the fallen leaves.

Thanks go out to our parent volunteers and to Tr. Lindsay for leading our Pennsylvanian woodland hike today!