Alphabet Project

Dear Families,

Thank you all so much for helping your children to select vegetables beginning with the alphabet letters that they took home. They are all so excited to make another batch of alphabet soup. The process of choosing an ingredient has been the subject of many a lunch conversation this week!

Our alphabet project (the creation of an alphabet chart on our wall) has been met with great enthusiasm this week. The children love figuring out how to arrange their bodies to make each letter of the alphabet, and they have started to think ahead and make plans for upcoming letters. This is a great way for them to start to move beyond recognition of letters and to comprehend the various types of lines that letters are composed of. The children are equally enthusiastic about decorating card-board alphabet letters to hang on our wall. They think hard each day about things that they might decorate the next day’s letter with! We are able to honor many of their ideas, which has been a wonderful way for the children to see that their plans are carried through in the classroom. Furthermore, this has deepened the children’s awareness of sound-symbol relationships.

Building on the children’s excitement about our new environmental print, we added labels to many of the toys and centers in the classroom. The labels contain both photos of the toys as well as written text. Hanging the labels in the classroom was a fun matching activity for the children. First they had to match two photo and word cards to each other, and then they had to find the related toy so that we could label it! Written labels support the children in connecting written text to meaning and also help children to organize themselves. Furthermore, an organized environment supports children in their ability to focus on their learning.

Related to our study of the English alphabet, we have done much talking about the Alef-Bet (the Hebrew alphabet). The children were particularly curious to try out an Alef-Bet puzzle this week and were curious to try to make connections between English and Hebrew letters.

Another new thing in our classroom is our science center! This is a spot for the children to experiment with science materials, such as magnets, magnifying glasses, found objects for nature, etc. in a way that is hands on. It is wonderful to nurture the children’s curiosity about the world while teaching them tools (such as observation, making predictions) to learn about the world around them.

A math skill that we have focused on this week is the concept of estimation. The children have practiced saying this new long word, and have learned that to make an estimation means to make a “thinking guess.” We have enjoyed playing with our “estimation jar.” The children look at a set of objects in the jar, and make estimates about how many might be inside. They have even begun to record their own estimates. The children have learned three steps to estimation: first they make their “thinking guess,” then they record their responses, and finally, we check our guesses. This has been a great opportunity to practice writing numerical digits. We have learned that counting is a great strategy to check our work. Learning to stop and check over work that they have done is important to developing children’s critical thinking skills, and will support them in all areas of learning throughout their years of schooling. When we estimate, we check our work by counting the objects in the estimation jar. As always, when we count at school, we remind the children to line up the objects and to then use their “magic pointer fingers” to touch and track each object as they count.

We have also begun support the children in building directionality and learning right and left in school this week by teaching them to recognize their right hands. We’ve used a multi-sensory approach to support the children in their diverse learning styles. We’ve given the children stamps, a drop of warm water, stickers, and a dot drawn with washable marker on their right hands. By over-teaching children to recognize their right hands, we automatically support the children in learning to recognize the left, as that is the only other alternative! We’ve been enjoying practicing discriminating right from left by dancing to the hokey pokey. While not all children are right-handed, teaching the right hand supports them in learning some of the special things that we do with this hand.

One of the things that the children have learned that we do with our right hands is to shake hands! We’ve started singing and dancing to a new hello song in which the children greet each other and teachers by shaking hands. They learn to look their partner in the eye, shake right hands, and say hello. While we live in a world that is increasingly casual in terms of social interactions, building eye contact and learning to politely greet someone remain essential social skills. This may be a fun skill to reinforce at home!

Shabbat Shalom,

Morah Larissa and Morah Kate