World of Wonder In Kindergarten: March 2014

Thursday, 27 March 2014

The Importance of Oral Communication in Kindergarten

Dear Parents,

Please take a moment and look over the importance of oral communication in the early years as outlined in the Kindergarten program. Follow the link to find some communication tips and examples to use with your children.

Building on Oral Language

Although children develop skills in reading, writing, and oral language (listening and speaking) from an early age, oral language must be the foundation of literacy development in the Full-Day Early Learning–Kindergarten program. Through experience with oral language, children develop the ability to identify and manipulate phonemes (phonemic awareness), build vocabulary, develop awareness of meaning (semantic knowledge), and develop awareness of language structure (syntactic knowledge), and thus develop the foundations for reading and writing. Proficiencyin oral language is critical to the success of literacy development. The EL–K team can guide oral language development by listening attentively to and observing children’s responses and interactions, by providing models of richer responses to guide children’s thinking, and by introducing new vocabulary. Although oral language is the focus of early language learning, reading and writing need to be taught and developed at the same time, so that children can make connections between what they hear, say, read, and write. Listening, speaking, reading, and writing are all interrelated, and development in one area supports development

in all the others.

(Full Day Early Learning Kindergarten Program 2010-2011 pg. 68)

Link

Message In a Backpack: Listen, Talk, Answer - Support Your Child's Learning

https://www.naeyc.org/files/tyc/file/MessageV4N1.pdf

Thank you,

Mrs. Lau and Mrs. Andrade

Monday, 24 March 2014

Mrs. Lau and Mrs. Andrade's Class

We Are Artists

Mixing Colours Experiment

In October, we read a story called

Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni.

During the story, we asked the children to predict what would happen when Little Blue and Little Yellow hugged.

These are some of the predictions:

“They will be happy.” ~ Edoardo

“They will turn green.” ~ Christian

“They will mush together.” ~ Tony

When you mix blue and yellow together, you make green!

We decided to try and create other colours by mixing paint together. We also used the overhead projector and coloured paddles to help us decide which colour to try next.

We found that:

blue and red make purple

white and red make pink

yellow and red make orange

On Monday March 17th, we read a story called Sky Colour by Peter H. Reynolds.

This story is about a little girl named Marisol who loves to paint. So when her teacher asks her to help make a mural for the school library, she can’t wait to begin! But how can Marisol make a sky without blue paint?

We asked the children: What colour is the sky?

This is what they said.

While reading this story, it reminded us of the colour mixing and the book we read in October. We revisited our documentation to remind us how to mix colours.

We then asked the children: What colours mixed together make blue?

The children came up with some predictions and we tested our theories over the next two days. We discovered that white makes a colour lighter and black makes a colour darker. We used the paint we made to make some interesting paintings.

Natalia – My Daddy’s work truck.

Noah – I was mixing the colours.

Veronica – I made the sun. I made a rainbow. It’s raining.

Deana – I made a truck. It can drive when my Dad sits. It can drive when you put your seatbelt on.

On Wednesday, we decided to look on the internet to see if we could find the answer to our question. This is what we learned.

It’s easy to mix paints to make new colours. You can use the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) plus black and white to get all the colours of the rainbow.

Red, yellow and blue are primary colours. Primary colours are the most basic colours. You can’t make them by mixing other colours.

Hhhhmmmmmm!!!

So, we can’t make the colour blue!

You can’t make red, blue or yellow, but you could use those colours to make other colours.

Red, blue and yellow paint were put out at the art studio and the children created some paintings.

Alicia – It’s oysters that live in the water and eat soap. I used yellow, blue and red to make it. To make purple, I used red and blue. For green, blue and yellow. Red and yellow to get orange. Red and yellow made brown.

Natalia – I made a little girl. I used red, blue and yellow. When I mixed the red and blue and it made purple. I used blue and yellow and red to make a different colour.