What's HOPpening in the Green Room?: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Sunday, February 24, 2013

So on Tuesday, we had MadCap Puppets come and do a Puppet Show for us. Every year in May, Mel from MadCap comes and does an "Artist-in-Residency" for us (which is paid for, by the way, with the money received from the cookie dough everyone sold - thank you!). She stays for a whole week, gives several shows, and teaches us how to make and control our own puppets. As an introduction to this, earlier in the year MadCap sends a group to give us a little snippet of what's to come. This year's group was FABULOUS - they had so much energy that they fit right in with 300+ kindergartners! Speaking of fitting in, out of all 150 or so kids that were at the show (they did two shows), look who got picked to come up on stage? And be the KING in Rumplestiltskin!

Recognizing Print

Lately, I have been using our Morning Message to announce the Fabulous Froggy of the day, just to switch things up and get the kids to really LOOK at print concepts.

Before Christmas, I used their first names. We went through several rounds, and they got very good at figuring out who it was, so after Christmas, I switched to last names with Mr. and Miss (they get a kick out of that every day for the first couple of weeks!). Some are really using their deductive reasoning skills! This is what I overheard on Friday morning as we worked on the message:

C: "It's J!"

J: "No, it can't be me, because I don't have 6 letters in my last name."

Some are even getting good enough at it to see the "shape" of the word. I have heard things like, "It's {name} because she has a tall letter/swimmer in the third/fourth/fifth... spot."

And this is why I love my job. :-)

Math Addition Lesson

This week we did a really cool math lesson; the kids seemed to really enjoy it. This class is getting so good at addition, I think we will start subtraction very soon.

I gave each pair of students (they got to pick their partner) a brown paper bag with 20 connecting cubes (10 ea. of two colors). They had to shake the bag, reach in and grab a handful, sort them, and write the addition sentence to match. Of course, some of them tried their hardest to grab ALL of the cubes, to see what that would come out to be. :-)