We began by talking about what each of us can do that makes us special: playing soccer, attending dance class, being a big brother, having a twin, etc. After we all shared we noticed that some of the things that make us special individually, we have in common with a few others in our class, but not everyone. We learned that we can sort our likes and differences by characteristics, or things that describe us.
The first characteristic that we explored that makes us special was if we are a boy or a girl. We learned that we have 8 boys and 8 girls in our class.
Next we discussed our hair and all of the things that make it special: length, style, if it is straight or curly, and color. We leaned that if our hair is yellow we are described as blonde, if our hair is brown we are described as brunette, if our hair is red we are described as red headed, and if our hair is a mix of blonde and red we are described as strawberry blonde. It was really funny to find out that Anna's hair could be described with the name of a fruit! Again we charted our characteristics and discovered that were tied with 7 blondes and 7 brunettes, so we added Mrs.Baker and Mrs.Straessle's hair only to keep the tie with 8 blondes and 8 brunettes!
You have to look closely to see the next feature we discussed, our eyes! After learning all of the parts of the eye, we discussed what makes our eyes special: the shape of our eyes, the length and color of our eyelashes, and the color of our eyes. While not every eye is the same hue, we noticed that we can group our class eye color into 3 main colors: brown, blue, and green. We learned that the most common eye color in our class is brown, closely followed by blue.
We then learned that one special thing we all have is our name. Our names are all different, but each name is made up of different letters and each name has a different number of letters. We each took turn spelling our name (I was so impressed with how many of our students knew how to spell their name!) and adding the letters to our graph.
After we graphed our names, we counted how many friends names had the same number of letters and made a class graph. We learned that the shortest name in our class has 3 letters, the longest name in our class has 13 letters, and the name length that appears the most frequent in our class has 6 letters.
One of our favorite discussions of the week was talking about our birthdays! There are so many special things that we get to do on our birthday and celebrating with a party is by far the best part of starting off our next year of life. We learned that while no two people in our class share a birthday, two people share their birthday with their twin! Savannah shares her birthday with her twin brother, Austin who is in Mrs.Selig's class and Mrs.Straessle has a twin brother and their birthday is full of lots of cards and candy because it is on Valentine's Day!
We used a bar graph to group our birthdays by month and learned that the month that has the most birthdays is October, with 4 of our friends being born that month.
Next, we learned that we all grow and change and although we are all 4 and 5 years old that we are not all the same height and this is another thing that makes us special. We learned that height is measured in feet and inches just like the height chart on our door but we could also use other tools to measure our height and compare. We discussed that we could use pencils, linking cubes, blocks, really anything to measure and compare our heights. So we then used string to measure our heights and compared them on our height chart. We discovered that Tyler, Brennen, and Taylor are tied for being the tallest and that Sloane is the shortest friend in our class.
We ended the week by learning all about our emotions. We learned what emotions are and talked about how even though we all can experience the same event we can all feel differently about it. After we all shared how we felt about starting new school, some scared, some excited, so nervous, we all practiced making the different faces that come with experiencing different emotions. Finally, we concluded our lesson by all drawing a picture of an emotion of our choice and writing the descriptive word. Check out our great penmanship!
We had so much fun exploring everything that makes us special and I can't wait for another fantastic week in PreK B!
