Chrysanthemum loves her long, beautiful name – until she starts kindergarten and the other children tease her about it.  Chrysanthemum starts feeling badly about herself and doesn’t want to go to school anymore.  This book by Kevin Henkes reminds us that our words are powerful and can hurt others if we’re not careful. 

Chrysanthemum has 13 letters in her name.  We made a graph of the number of letters in each of our names.  We know that most people have 4 letters in their name and one person has 7.

A told B
and B told C,
“I’ll meet you at the top
of the coconut tree.”

We love the video Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault.  We enjoy singing along as all the letters of the alphabet race one another up the coconut tree. But . . . will there be enough room? Oh, no!  Chicka chicka BOOM! BOOM!

The rhyming words are so appealing and memorable that we have been using them to help us recognize the names of the letters of the alphabet.  We choose a coconut card and see if we can recall the names.   

The children have been exploring colour – as scientists, as artists, as readers and as mathematicians. 

Red, yellow and blue are primary colours. Primary colours are the most basic colours. You can’t make them by mixing any other colours.

Orange, green and purple are the secondary colours. A secondary color is made by mixing two primary colors.  We made orange by mixing red and yellow.   Green is created by mixing yellow and blue.  To get purple, we mixed red and blue. 

We have also been working on identifying colour words.  Here we are sorting candy by one attribute – colour. 

Ask me about what I did.