Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Wednesday, June 3rd we enjoyed a gorgeous morning out on the playground and park for our annual preschool picnic! Thank you to all the families that came out to enjoy the beautiful day, celebrate the end of the school year, and connect with other preschool families! I think everyone had a great time! Enjoy some pictures below!

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Over the past six weeks, our class has been on an inquiry adventure all about butterflies! This is our first “formal” written unit with our new International Baccalaureate PYP model. What an awesome six weeks it has been! Miss Santiago and I are amazed at the deep rich conversations, learning, critical thinking, and play that took place within our classroom. I am so proud of our children and am excited to share with you pictures of their learning through play!

Our central idea for the unit of inquiry was: Relationships within an environment impact change. This helped guide us into our lines of inquiry for the children to explore and learn. This ties in with our central idea. Our lines of inquiry included: What a butterfly is. How a butterfly impacts the environment. The life cycle of a butterfly. Through these lines of inquiry, we thoughtfully created questions and lessons to stir child interest. From there the children took over, and what a study it has been!

Throughout the six weeks, we had the privilege to have 45 tiny butterfly larvae (right out of the eggs) come to our classroom! Each child was able to “pick” their own “caterpillar” to raise and take care of throughout their life cycle. We had a lot of science and exploration going on in room 121, and I am so thrilled each student had the opportunity to take care of and observe daily their very own caterpillar that turned into a butterfly. We released them the week before Memorial Day weekend, and it was such a rewarding experience for the children! Each student kept their own “Butterfly Observation Journal” that tracked the progress of the life cycle that their butterfly was at. They will be coming home the first week of June with a rubric to show you our goals for them, and how they achieved them through their journal!

Our large culminating experience was a field trip to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, where we visited the Butterfly Haven to observe and learn more about butterflies! We “adopted” one butterfly to release into the haven on that day! What a rewarding experience for the children!

This last week of our butterfly study we have been doing our reflection piece for the unit. I have been sitting down with each student one-on-one to talk with them about our unit study. As an educator, I feel so fortunate to be having these moments with each of my students, and am so proud of the learning that has taken place.

Please enjoy this picture slideshow below of all the learning that took place in our classroom!

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CHICAGO: READY TO LEARN! (RTL)

Ready..Set..Enroll!​ Preschool Application Fair – THIS SATURDAY!!!

The Office of Early Childhood Education (OECE) is pleased to host a preschool application fair: Saturday, April 25, 2015, at Lindblom High School and Whitney Young High School. Families will have an opportunity to apply for preschool and enjoy a morning of fun-filled activities. Please share with families!!! Click to see the English and Spanish flier.

Application Period Is Ending Soon!!!

Spring break greetings! I came across a great opportunity for your child to build and create his/her own garden box! Looks like a lot of fun! It is free, and all you have to do is register your child for the event at your local Lowe’s! Click on the link below! http://m.lowesbuildandgrow.com/Lowe’s Build and Grow Workshop

On Tuesday of this week our preschool program made its annual pilgrimage to the Lincoln Park Zoo! We love the Lincoln Park Zoo for many reasons. One; it’s free. Two; it’s in the city that we live and love. Three; they have some amazing new things coming to the zoo! It keeps getting better and better as the years go by. And the one thing that always amazes me is how all of this is done by donors like you and me! Anyway, enough of that! Let’s get down to the good stuff!

We studied zoo animals throughout the month of March. We started off by just naming and identifying animals the children knew. We discovered that most the kids were really interested in animals that come from Africa and Australia. So, we began to focus in on many of those animals. Example: lions, tigers, giraffes, hippos, zebras. This lead us into the discovery of looking closely at groups of animals that have stripes, spots, and solids. In thinking in that mind set of grouping animals to that nature, we then began to have conversations about animals that have fur, feathers, scales, and bare skin! Our journals, sketches, small group discussions, and art projects were great opportunities to discover and learn about these concepts. The children were just amazing in what they came up with! I am so proud of them!

Please make sure to check out our bulletin board outside of our classroom this month! It shows all of the learning the children went through during our Zoo Unit! Enjoy some pictures we captured throughout our unit! Have a wonderful and safe spring break!

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We ended our outer space study a few weeks ago, but I finally was able to sync my memory card to the computer yesterday! The children had a fabulous time with our unit study of space. First we created a KWL chart of things we already knew about space, things we wanted to know about space, and then throughout the unit study we wrote down things we were learning.

After we figured out what the children already knew, and things they wanted to learn about, we began exploring and learning about space through play! We read LOTS of books to find out information and to see photographs of different planets, comets, moons, and stars in our solar system!

We enjoyed building our own rocket ships and space ships, creating our own astronaut helmets, and the children’s favorite….our own clay moons! There was a lot of discussion around Pluto. Poor Pluto!!! After researching with the children for a few days, we discovered that there are three qualities that make a planet. One: They must be in the shape of a sphere. Pluto is not. It’s more of an oval shape. Two: They must have it’s own orbital path. Pluto’s does not have an orbital path. Three: A planet must orbit the sun. Pluto does not. It orbits Neptune! So there you have it! Pluto is not a planet!

Over the course of three days, the children got to see how astronauts live in outer space. There was a wonderful series of NASA school you tube videos that I found on our class iPad. During small groups, the children got to watch and see how these astronauts live day in and day out in outer space. The children really got a kick out of the videos, and directly took that gained knowledge and role played throughout the room for the next several days in class.

During this unit of study, the children really began to take notice of our own planet and how special and unique our planet is. Many questions were generated through discussion, reading books, and prior knowledge that a few children had. We created our own “Marble Earth” using colored shaving cream and whipping them together to make the movement of the Earth seen from space! It was such an awesome creative learning experience for the children, and their creativity and higher order thinking skills really shone through! We were so proud of them!

Please enjoy some moments we were able to capture on our camera!

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Greetings All!

This is a mid-week update on our Preschool Team’s Amazon Wish List!!! We have updated some of our items, and hope that there is some interest in helping our team with a few supplies we are in need of!

Why an Amazon Wish List? Well, over the past several years we have written numerous Donors-choose grants for the “big stuff” we have needed. Example: wireless headphones and listening centers for all three classrooms! However, Donors-choose only allows for us to request things from specific vendors…and often times can be at a more expensive price. Many of the items that we would love to have in our classroom do not come from those vendors and/or are much cheaper if we get them through Amazon. Make sense?

If you lost the first link I sent in an email a few weeks ago, here it is again. http://amzn.com/w/EBGZX63L46U3

We would be so appreciative of any purchase that you or your family might be willing to help us out with! I do know that a couple families were talking about going in on something together. (Each donating $10 towards a bigger item). Please let me know if you have any questions!!!

A HUGE thank you to Kingston’s family for purchasing our recess balls for the preschool team! We are super excited to get those blown up and take outside with us to recess soon!

Thank you for your support in advance!

Between all the snow days and days off in February, it seems I once again got behind on our classroom blog! Sorry about that! We’ve been super busy in Room 121 with our three week long Outer Space Study that ended last week. Pictures of our learning will be posted tomorrow.

We are now beginning to examine different animals that we might see at the zoo. This year instead of focusing on two-four specific animals to study, we are having the children examine animals that have stripes, spots, and solids! We also will have them explore animals that have feathers, fur, hair and what the difference is!

Check back this week to see photos and more in depth information on the learning taking place in room 121!

Whoa! What a busy last few weeks in Room 121! January flew by it seems! We’ve been super scientists over the past two weeks, and even threw in some awesome math concepts as well! Over the past three weeks the students have been enjoying learning all about Penguins! Our small groups have involved concepts and activities surrounding penguins, their habitats, the parts of a penguin, how they stay warm, what they eat, and the life cycle that they go through! The kids this month have been little sponges in soaking up all the new learning and science experiments.

Last week, we discussed the blubber layer that is under the skin of many arctic animals such as penguins, seals, whales, etc… that keep them warm even in the coldest conditions. Students got to experience hands on this idea of blubber and the insulation that is provides by testing their skin and a penguin mitten in ice cold water! We created a “mock” penguin wing filled with “blubber” and had the children place their hands in the mitten to try out the cold water. Many of the students were amazed at how much warmer that extra layer of blubber really is for those animals! It was a fun hands on learning experience for the children.

In the area of math, we have been learning about pairs! Using favorite winter stories like “The Mitten” by Jan Brett and “Three Little Kittens” by Paul Galdone, we began to explore the “pairs” concept and what makes a pair. We explored different pairs in our everyday environment looking at our shoes, boots, pants, glasses, mittens, gloves, even my earrings as a student pointed out one morning! There are pairs all over our world, we just have to look for them! See how many pairs you can find at your home! Over the course of one week, the students created their own pair of mittens with Miss Santiago. Deciding on the color, and patterns they would create on their mittens. This lead to discussion on symmetry and what that looks like. What you do on one side, you must do to the other to make a perfect pair! (Just like in the books we read). So this began to create a lot of dialogue among our students and made them really analyze and pay attention to the pair of mittens they were creating and designing. The children did such an excellent job with this, that we decided to create our February bulletin board with many of their pairs on display! Please stop by outside of our room to take a look.

On Monday we took our first field trip of the year! We headed on down to the Chicago Children’s Museum at Navy Pier. What a fun and successful trip! We had such an excellent morning exploring and discovering new things everywhere we turned! Throughout our morning I had the pleasure of being able to walk around to each of our small groups and interact with several of the children on a one on one basis! I had excellent dialogue, questioning and higher order thinking with many of the children. I am so impressed by their critical thinking skills, ideas, and follow through! It was worth the trip down to Navy Pier on a snowy Monday, and I hope that your child had a fun educational trip as well. I would like to thank the following parents who came along and/or met us down at the museum yesterday! Your help was GREATLY appreciated! Thank you to Nick, Stephanie, Jody, Mary, Cristina, Shelia, Jorge, Sara, and Maria. (I hope I remembered everyone!) I also would like to extend a thank you to Miss Santiago, Mrs. Lebovitz our IB PYP coordinator, and “Mr. John” for taking on a group of children! You helped make the day run smoothly and fun for the kids! Please enjoy our picture slide show from our trip! If you have pictures you would like to share from our trip, please email them to me at klhopkins@cps.edu

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