Pre-k Week 5: What plants and animals provide for us!

Week 5: Four fabulous days learning about how human beings and animals are co-dependent on each other.

We arrived Tuesday morning to find some cheeky animals had visited our classroom over Golden Week!

Inquiry: We started the week feeling Miss Jasmines woolen jumper and our uniforms at the same time. We spoke about how the woolen jumper felt "soft and warm" that's because its made out of wool! A special material that originally comes from sheep. 

Inquiry and language

This week we started to focus on what plants and animals provide for us.  We looked closely at the wool industry and how sheep provide Woolly winter clothes for us. We read the book ‘Woolly sally’ which told us a friendship story about how a farm boy and his family cared for the sheep. The story also told us about ‘shearing’ where a sheep is given a hair cut every winter, the wool is spun to make thread and the thread can be used for many different things in our lives! We even started to knit our own scarves in class for our class toys! 

The story also told us about ‘shearing’ where a sheep is given a hair cut every winter, the wool is spun to make thread and the thread can be used for many different things in our lives! We even started to knit our own scarves in class for our class toys! We built on our fine motor skills through french knitting taught by Miss Jasmine. 

               We also painted sheep and wool using our fingers! 

Developing our English speech and language skills

We are starting to extend our English vocabulary by discussing our opinions on books we have read in class. ‘Talking Turtle’ swims to us and listens to our opinion “I liked the books because” or “I didn’t like the books because”. We are starting to understand elements of story such as characters, setting and plot. We try to encourage each other to use these words when discussing the story and our appreciation of the text. We are beginning to understand the structure of a story through story mapping to understand story sequencing:  beginning, middle and end. 

Mathematics

In math’s this week we started to understand what it means to add. We showed miss jasmine what we knew and worked through different counting strategies we can use in the future! We looked at drawing symbols, counting dots like on dice or using objects such as our ‘ping pong balls’.

We are developing Art appreciation and Understanding of shape

Miss Jasmine showed us different shapes and asked us to draw what we thought they were on whiteboards.

Learning about shape and space we began to understand shapes are all around us, even in our classroom. We are pretty clever! We found all the following shapes hiding in our classroom. 

Rectangles:

Circles:

Triangles:

Squares:

We started to appreciate a famous artist known as Kandinsky by analyzing the artworks 'blue' (1925) and 'yellow, blue, red' (1925). We decided to create our own Kandinsky artworks by cutting out shapes and creating abstract art connecting our mathematical knowledge of shape to visual arts.