Kindergarten September in Review

Our Kindergarten year is off to a great start! We are all finding our rhythm and coming together as a lovely class. A few reminders - Please make sure your child has an extra set of clothing for C1 as well as a pair of indoor shoes for C1. In addition, we will go outside every Friday for our "outing". Hopefully the mosquitos will subside soon so we can start hiking at Olin!

We start our year working on understanding our place in this world, or our "Cosmic Address". The children receive lessons on how the universe was formed, how our solar system began, and how our earth is just right for life. We talk about how we are all made up of "star dust", even though we all look different and have different preferences. Through this work we explore art, writing, story telling, and geography.

Here is the story that we tell during class:

"Where did you come from? Where did EVERYTHING come from?

You came out of your mother. But where did MOTHERS come from? And where did their parents come from?

This is a science story about where stars, oceans, air, lions, kittens, grass...and EVERYTHING comes from.

Once upon a time, the universe was born. It was a tiny universe at first, smaller than a speck of dust.

The speck burst into a cabbage-sized universe.

Then it exploded up to a galaxy-sized universe. After that, it kept on growing but more slowly.

Glowing bolts of energy shrank and turned into very tiny particles. The particles came together and formed the very first element: HYDROGEN.

Enormous clouds of hydrogen everywhere shrank and ignited into billions of stars that gathered in GALAXIES, that sparkled like star cities in the black night.

In your Milky Way Galaxy, clouds of hydrogen ignited into huge MOTHER STARS everywhere. One was your Mother Star.

Your Mother Star baked hydrogen into lots of new elements, like carbon, oxygen, calcium, and all the elements that would be necessary for life.

Your Mother Star died in a massive explosion, a SUPERNOVA, blasting her stardust into space. The stardust formed a huge cloud that began to spin and flatten into a disk that got tighter, denser, and hotter...

...until whoosh

...your SUN flared into life in the center of the disk and eight young PLANETS formed in the outer parts of the disk.

The third planet from the Sun, EARTH, was a hot molten planet made out of stardust and covered with volcanoes.

In Earth's hot bubbling ocean's, an amazing thing happened: out of water and hot rocks, the very first invisible LIVING THINGS began to move and multiply...

Over four billion years life would turn into dinosaurs, penguins, whales, astronauts, and you. You are made out of stardust from an ancient star, that was made out of a cloud of hydrogen, that came out of a universe born as a tiny speck a long time ago."