*Last Day of Kindergarten Clusters*

Friday marked the last day in my Enrichment Cluster with kindergarden group. I had been helping out with this cluster for 5 weeks, once a week, and have fallen in love with those little kids!! Their sweet, innocent comments will definitely be remembered!

This cluster group was called "Oceans Adventure" and the students were learning about a different ocean animal every day. When I walked into the classroom on Friday, the teacher was busy dealing with another issue, so she asked me to begin the lesson talking about whales. She had an ocean book where I read the book to the students. Boy, was this a task :) After I got everyone settled and began the book, they were amazed at how big whales were! It was precious to see them comparing their size to a whale's size. While we were reading, I was making sure to stop and ask questions, which a year ago was a difficult task for me, but I have seen myself progress in my questioning development. We learned how big a Humpback Whale is, what color they are, and various other facts. The students LOVED talking about whales.

After this, the students watched a Magic School Bus video of the ocean adventure while eating goldfish and drinking "ocean juice", which was blue Koolaid. They were thrilled to hear the juice called ocean juice. While they were watching the video, they were creating their own ocean scene. We told them to use ocean creatures that we had learned about. It was very interesting to see them recall the various elements of the ocean that we had talked about. They were even coloring them the ways that we had talked about they looked and were giving the octopus the right amount of legs! Some students even gave their sea stars suckers to hold on to the floor!

From this cluster, I have learned to make sure that the students are challenged, regardless of age. I believe that every student needs to be challenged in order to develop to their full potential.

I have also learned a great deal on how to keep kindergarteners interested and on task! One way is to give them a job, which I will definitely do in my classroom. One student was really outgoing and could not stay on task for long, so in order to help him, I asked him to be my glue patrol and to tell me whenever someone else needed glue. It was SO precious to see him take on this role and really strive at it! The students loved the help from another student!