Welcome to week 2, this week we began our unit on healthy foods! This week was devoted to fruits and vegetables. We used a lot of our natural play environment to conduct lessons, here are two pre-k students busily engaged in an imaginative kitchen:

Though both student groups focused on the concept recognizing and understanding what fruits and vegetables are are in English, the pre-K set modified their work to one fruit and one vegetable per day.  A deliberate effort was made to select the fruit/vegetable based on phonic awareness. Example: A for Apple or B for Banana. All students enjoy colouring and this helped our younger students in particular build a bridge between what was learned in week one colours and the unit theme of foods.


The Kindergarten cohort, already familiar with the names and characteristics of many fruits and vegetables in Russian and Tatar languages was able to extend their vocabulary and expression much farther in English. We did this creatively through making fruit and vegetable baskets. When the student needed help knowing what a certain fruit or vegetable looked like or what colour it was they could use the toy models as an example. This activity took two class periods and was  quite the success and enjoyed by all.

Both the pre-k and Kindergarten group have the ability to express their thoughts about our week`s theme. However, developmentally the younger group was more apt to do this through direct modeling of actual objects. In the process practicing fine motor skills. The below picture illustates some of their work.
The Kindergarten group strengthened their analytical abilities and vocabulary with the theme worthy game of fruit dominos:
The Kindergarten group strong in their verbal and recall abilities was challenged on Friday to express in English their likes and dislikes. For example: `I like apples` `I dislike eggplant.` This cohort did a wonderful job with this! I am very proud of them:
 Happy Birthday!!!
This week we celebrated the birthday of two lovely students in the pre-k cohort. Academics aside for an afternoon the party was enjoyed by all!
 

How much fun have we had in the last  week starting school and learning? You're about to see! This journal entry  is about week 1 and week 2, colours and foods.
Picture
We will begin every class in both pre-k and Kindergarten with circle time, this is a picture of the Kindergarten group.

Our first day we all made our name tags in English to help get to know each other and see our names as they appear in Roman script.



On Tuesday we practiced the colours in English with the `Colour Me Happy` sheet, this task was completed by nearly all students in both classes!
This task also helped us start to understand the of a rainbow which we would test the next day through making rainbow catterpillars 

Students could make their catterpillars as long or short as they wanted, the important aspect  of this project was that a student deliberately chose the colour in English they wanted and practice fine motor skills such a curling paper and gluing (pre-k.)

Thursday and Friday were dedicated to our efforts to creating a class story book about the colours using popular cartoon characters. Thursday we coloured and Friday we read the finished product together.

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