Category: Hoot Owls

Maggie and the Hoot Owls have been learning about and talking about their families. The Hoot Owls made family portraits by using buttons as heads to count how many people are in their families.

Next the Hoot Owls took the portraits and graphed how many people are in their families. They learned that ten Hoot Owls have four people in their family, four Hoot Owls have five people in their family, and two Hoot owls have three and six people in their families. The class read the book My Family is from Different Places by Daria Leavitt about a mixed race family and how special it can be to have two cultures to celebrate. The teachers encouraged the Hoot Owls to find out where their ancestors are from to see if their family is also from different places.

The Hoot Owls made their first graph of the year! The students learned that a graph is a picture that helps people “see math.” The Hoot Owls worked on this activity together during circle time. Each Pre-K student counted how many letters were in their name and then put their name above that number on the graph. After all owls added their name to the graph, the students noticed that no one in their class has a seven letter name. They also noticed that Leonardo has the longest name, and that eight kids have five letter names.

The Hoot Owls have been talking about the differences between home and school. They read the books Home by Carson Ellis and The House that Jill Built by Phyllis Root. They then reviewed the shapes square, rectangle and triangle, and math terms like small, medium and large, and then talked about how they could use the shapes and sizes to construct an image of a house.

Some Hoot Owls made realistic houses while others chose to use their imagination and create a pretend house. Students who are getting the hang of writing chose to write either the word “house” or “home” on their artwork. Next students were asked, “Who lives in your house?” This led many Hoot Owls to draw their families inside their homes.

This week, the Hoot Owls learned about the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon Festival, that is celebrated in East and Southeast Asia to mark the end of the autumn harvest. The students read the book Thanking the Moon by Grace Lin, and learned how Maggie, one of the Pre-K teachers, celebrates the festival with her family. Maggie shared that this Saturday evening, September 10th, she will have a special dinner with her family and then go out to view the moon at night. During the viewing, her family will eat fruits and mooncakes and thank the moon for a bountiful harvest.

The Hoot Owls got to try their hand at making play-dough mooncakes using real mooncake presses. They were delighted at the beautiful “mooncakes” they created!

Thank you, Maggie, for sharing your family tradition with the Hoot Owls.

#SaklanDiversity #SaklanConnected

Recently, Ms. Maggie and the Hoot Owls worked on creating some really unique houses! Using tape and craft sticks, the Hoot Owls constructed square, rectangular and even triangular-shaped houses. The features of the houses varied during this open-ended project, with some students choosing to add doors and windows and others adding bridges! Most of the Hoot Owls plan to use their houses as bird houses.

This fun activity allowed the Hoot Owls to work on their fine motor skills, shape recognition and of course creativity and design!

#SaklanCreative