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April 12

ART
Continuing our work in small teams we spent the week working on the overall organization of images in our class mural. We considered our narrative as we began matching and placing our birds, animals and insects to the seasons depicted in the mural.  We are discovering how spatial organization of elements, contrast and color can create foreground, distance, excitement and narrative connections. Our work together is helping us to integrate form, content and the expressive qualities of imagery as we tell our BIG story about the seasons.   

In the two’s nest we spent the week revisiting watercolors. We have made wonderful progress in learning the process of moving a brush to water, to color palette, and to paper in an effective sequential order.

DRAMA (Note: this report always refers to the week prior due to our drama schedule)
This week, we reenacted the story of Chicken Little. The children each played an individual role as Chicken Little and Friends. We explored different traveling movements for each character and experimented with individual dialogue responses. The birds and fowl played a call and open-ended response singing game with the fox called "We are dancing in the forest."

LITERACY
This week, we started a new author study of Amy Rosenthal.  First, we read Spoon and found out why Spoon is so special.  We illustrated a picture of ourselves and wrote about what makes us special!  We also read many of her other books, such as Little Pea, Little Hoot, and Chopsticks , and we voted on our favorite of Rosenthal’s books.  In our literacy pull-out groups, we worked on sequencing and made our very own sequencing game to play at home.

MATH
This week in the math center the whole school worked together to make shape bingo boards for all the 3’s and 4’s! Some of our kids cut out shapes while others sorted shapes into piles. All the kids assembled their own boards! Please check your mail clips for your child’s “game in a bag.”

MUSIC
During music group this week, we improvised songs about our favorite vehicles. We sang about the way our imaginary vehicles would move through the world and about the adventures our vehicles would take us on! In keeping with the transportation theme, we also sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver.

SCIENCE
This week we continued to talk about planting and flowers.  We observed and watered our classroom plants. The children noticed that plant # 3 (grass) is growing very quickly,  while plant #2 (rainbow daisies) have barely started to grow, and plant #1 (marigolds) is growing steadily. We also talked about the fact that some of the plants at our playground are showing signs that they’ve been trampled and picked.  We decided to make some signs to protect our living flowers. We will laminate them and hang them up at the park in hopes of inspiring our community to help us protect the flowers. Some of the children’s offerings include “Don’t stomp! Don’t step!,” “Don’t hurt the flowers.  They are very delicate because somebody planted them,” and “Don’t pick the flowers because they will never grow back.”

TWOs
This week the two year olds have been talking a lot about flowers - the most visible signs of spring! On our walk to the playground, we stopped by different flowers to look at them and ask ourselves questions about how they grow. When we got back to school, we talked about what flowers need to grow. We also talked about how we should not pick the flowers, as someone worked very hard to plant them so that we can enjoy them.

April 5

ART
Our mural work has continued to progress. This week we glued tissue paper foliage onto trees, collaged 3-D nests, and rolled little air-dry clay eggs. We decided on the animals and birds we wanted to include to represent migration and hibernation and researched each on the ipad. We observed and discussed their characteristics and together built our representations in steps using shapes, lines, and colors. We continue to look closely at our mural in order to consider what we have represented and to decide on what more we might want to add.  This week the Two's enjoyed a collaborative activity in which they could explore printing and drawing while moving freely around a table-size paper surface choosing from a large variety of rubber stamps and markers.

DRAMA (Note: this report always refers to the week prior due to our drama schedule)
This week in drama, we celebrated the birth of spring with the Aztec folktale, The Musicians of the Sun, as written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott. Through interactive storytelling and narrative pantomime, the children, as the character, Wind, rescued the musicians held captive by the Sun. The children particularly enjoyed escaping under the large, black cloth thunder cloud. Wind delivered them safely to earth bringing music, light, and color to the world.

LITERACY
Thank  you to everyone who came to visit with author and illustrator Tad Hills!  We’ve been talking about Duck and his eyebrows quite often this week. At the literacy center, we had letter week. We played a new word building puzzle and made name books, using letter stencils and cray pas. We read R is For Rocket by Tad Hills and learned about alliteration. We thought of words that start with the same letter as our name and wrote and illustrated books of alliteration.  In our literacy pull-out groups, we learned a new word of the week and added words to our “Mighty Word Board.”

MATH
This week in math we focused on revisiting the rules of the block center. We talked about how to collaborate with friends to build structures, how to tell if a friend is using a block or not, and how to respond when a friend gets upset. The kids ended up building some great structures and practiced their social skills along the way!

MUSIC
This week, we experimented with recording our original song about kindness. It has been exciting to see just how proud the children are of their unique song! You can hear a little snippet of the song attached to this email. We've also had a fantastic time diving deeper into our studies of rhythm. We played "Rhythm Groceries" this week, a game that prompts us to clap and tap out the syllables of the names of our favorite foods. Although it's fun to see which child will blurt out "sour gummies!" or "kale salad!" when it's their turn to play, it's also quite intriguing to see how the children's sense of rhythm and memory for patterns can continually grow through this type of play.

SCIENCE
This week, we made a chart to sort all of our plastic reptiles, insects, and amphibians, and we counted and categorized each group. The children continue to independently design play around these animals - building housing for them in various creative ways.  We observed our three plants, watered them daily and charted their growth. We discussed different kinds of flowers, identifying ones we already knew and learning the names of new ones. The children drew flowers and gardens and dictated to me what kinds of flowers grew in their gardens and what kind of animals lived there. We read Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert and Plant the Tiny Seed by  Christie Matheson.

TWOs
This week we have talked about how we miss our friends when they are absent! The children are really starting to notice when a friend is missing from the group.  We have had group conversations, as well as some one on one conversations, about where our friends are when they are not in school. These kinds of conversations make us realize what special groups we have.