Josh Stevens PreKindergarten

What a fun, productive and memorable Summer Acceleration! ☀️

We created birdhouses and talked about birds that fly and don’t fly. 🐦🏠

Birds are also living things like us and require food, water, air and shelter. 🐛💧

Many thanks to the students for their hard work and enthusiasm! Enjoy a well earned summer. ♥️

Summer Acceleration is up and running! It has been a busy two weeks.
The students are thriving as they make friends while learning and having fun. ☀️

We learned about the wind and students created pinwheels and wind chimes. 🌬
Next week we will focus on birds. Students will make their very own birdhouses. 🐦

We continue to work on all of our standards and benchmarks each day. 🏫

Heartfelt thanks to students and families for making this year a complete success! We all learned and grew together. Milestones, goals, objectives and standards were achieved and surpassed. Moreover, we learned how to be a friend as the most special friendships were made this year. It was an absolute privilege and joy to be a part of your child’s academic journey. Every single one of these students is in my heart forever. Thank you for sharing them with us. ♥️
Yay for PreK! 🎓🌟

We have been learning about how things grow and change. For example: a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, an acorn becomes a tree and a seed becomes a flower. 🦋 🌳 🌺

Students created some adorable name caterpillars. 🐛 Letters and sounds were reviewed as well as counting all the letters in our names.

Our rhyming activity had students placing ants on pants! 🐜👖 Students also practiced writing numbers by recording the number of ants they placed on the pants.

We learned the parts of a flower and reviewed what they need to grow. ☀️

Students continue to work on all of their prekindergarten standards each day. 🏫

Happy Spring Break! We hope everyone is relaxing and having fun. 🐰

The last two weeks before break were spent learning about different modes of transportation 🚂 ✈️ 🚗 and
living and nonliving things. 🐝🏐

We identified and discussed all the ways we can get from one place to another. During our Share Write, a student pointed out that our feet can also be a mode of transportation!

Living things need food, water and oxygen. They grow, change and create more of themselves. 🌳🐠🌸

Insects and life cycles will be our next topic of investigation when we return to class next Tuesday. 🦋🐜🐝

We had a fun week of learning all about machines that help us do work. There are countless tools and machines that make life easier for us all. 🪛 💻

In addition to construction vehicles, we learned about machines like ovens, refrigerators and computers. What would we do without machines that cook our food or keep it cold? We are all big fans of computers, too!

Students also learned the importance of working together as a team in order to accomplish many things.

Congratulations to Daxton Brown for completing his ST Math Program! 👏🏼🌟

We continue to work on all of our prekindergarten standards each day.

Our topic of investigation of investigation this past week was “Let’s Build It”.
Students learned all about tools and building materials needed in order to construct something. 🔨

The story of The Three Little Pigs was discussed. Bricks are sturdy. 🧱
Straw and sticks? Not so much.
We learned that many things like books and movies all have a beginning, middle and end. 🎥

Students had fun measuring the height of their block structures with a ruler. Numbers and counting are important! 📏

We also blended consonant vowel consonant words like “web”, counted words in sentences, clapped out syllables and segmented compound words. 🪛

It was fun to celebrate Spirit Day by wearing green! 🍀
Students created festive rainbow illustrations complete with a pot of gold at the end of them. We also counted our pieces of gold! 🌈
We continue to work on all of your prekindergarten standards each day. 🏫

So many wonderful things have been happening in our classroom!

Highlights include:

Nevada Reading Week:
complete with spirit days and guest readers!
Thank you to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Schultz, Kyla & Lily Governale for reading to our class. The students were completely engaged and enjoyed every second of your storytelling. 📚

STEM Activities:
Erupting volcanos 🌋 (science happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar)

Sink or Float: students made predictions about which objects they thought would sink or float in water and recorded their results.

Dinosaur eggs: our paleontologists were hard at work hatching and identifying their respective dinosaurs. Learning is messy at times! 🦕🦖

We also celebrated birthdays:
Happy Birthday:
Liliana, Meztli and Savannah! 🎉

We continue to work on all of our prekindergarten standards. 🏫

What a fun and hectic week! We began our week with some Valentine’s Day festivities. Students enjoyed passing out and receiving Valentines from friends. ❤️

We also had a heart-tastic STEM center that showcased our engineering skills. Pictures of our day are featured below. Thank you all for making our day extra special by providing treats and cards. 🥰

We are learning about animals that live in the air and sea for the next two weeks. Did you know there are birds that have feathers and wings and do NOT fly? 🐧

We completed a circle chart distinguishing between birds that “fly” and “don’t fly”. 🦉

Our stories included:
A Crankenstein Valentine
All About Birds 🦩
The Ugly Duckling 🦢

Students identified characters and settings. We also discussed characters and their emotions.

One of our vocabulary words was “half”. We used a half circle to create a bird for one of our fine motor activities. 🐦
They turned out great! Pictures below.
Students created some 3D bird art with a pom pom and feathers!

We also celebrated a birthday.
Happy Birthday, Valarie! 🎉

This week we will learn about animals that live in the water. 🦀 🐙
We continue to work on all of our PreK standards each day.

We wrapped up our “In the Wild” topic of investigation. Students identified animals and their habitats. 🙊🌳 They also learned about nocturnal animals. 🦉

We listened to the book “The Mixed-Up Chameleon” by Eric Carle. We identified characters, settings and sequenced the story. Students also discussed why it is important to be yourself. 🦎

Our next topic of investigation will be “Animals in the Air and Sea”. 🦅🐙

FYI if you want to send your child a sweet treat! ❤️

Our bright early learners completed a week of learning about animals in the wild. 🦒🦓

Unlike pets or animals on a farm, animals in the wild must provide their own food, water and shelter.
It was fun and informative to focus on how domesticated pets and farm animals, whose needs are provided for by humans, differ from animals that live in the wild. 🐘🐆

We discussed various habitats such as grasslands, the arctic and tropical rain forests. 🦥

We also pretended to be frogs in a forest. Students hopped from a start line to a finish line. We estimated how many hops we thought it would take and compared that number to the actual amount of hops.
We graphed our results and analyzed our data. We determined whether our predictions were greater than, equal to, or less than the actual number. 🐸

Our stories this week included:
Giraffes Can’t Dance 🦒
Grumpy Monkey 🙉
We identified characters and settings, emotions and sequenced the stories.

We also had a birthday! Happy Birthday, Jackson!

We continue to work on all of our Nevada PreKindergarten standards each day. We will continue our “In the Wild” topic of investigation this week. 🏫