Thursday News

May 2nd, 2013

Like the flowers that have been popping open all at once outside our windows these days, the Cardinal classroom's academic spirit is in full bloom! The children have been showing off their true academic colors in many different areas from scientific examinations of different flowers, to letter  games brought to us from both our Cardinal Teachers and our Cardinal families.

Kate came to school with us a real sunflower and, since we all now have been seeing flowers through a scientific lens thanks to our friend Roseanne's lesson, we conducted a scientific examination of the parts of this Sunflower finding what is different looking or the same between this flower and the flowers we had been looking at before. With some extra help from Kristina, Stella's mom who is also a science teacher at AFS, we found the flower sections we were hoping to identify and learned a little more about the differences.

The morning began as the children came into the classroom and found materials set up for them to use. Large alphabet tiles shared the front rug space with small letter tiles. One set with uppercase letters, the other lower case letters.

The children began their letter explorations on their own, spelling their names or arranging the letters in alphabetic order, and once in a while a Cardinal Teacher would come with an idea or suggestion. The children began spelling out their families for each other, sounding out the names of their loved ones as well as words like "Mommy" and "Daddy".

The sounds of children carefully slowing down the sounds of words to identify the different letter components could be heard from the front rug to the back tables where the children were continuing the book making project that had been started this week.

A different group of Cardinals who had been inspired by their friends who had started this activity yesterday were hard at work thinking of imaginative stories and then finding ways to express their stories in written form, trying out making sound to letter associations!

Finding even more ways to expand our growing need for intellectual stimulation, our friend Violet shared with us a letter game her Mom and her play during bath time. This game show style activity goes by the name of "Guess My Letter!!" and involves one player picking up a letter (we used our handy letter tiles) and hiding it from view. Then the hider gives a few words that feature the hidden letter at the beginning, and the other player has to Guess That Letter!! It was a fun adventure finding several word examples for each letter to help the guesser, and I am sure "Guess My Letter!!" will become a favorite of the Cardinal classroom and led to an interest in other letter and number focused games!

We decided to finish our morning outside and immediately it became apparent that today was going to be a "jump right in" sort of outdoor playtime...

Confidence was not left behind in our classroom when we put down our letter writing pencils and changed into our water stomping boots and the water pond was a focal point for the majority of our class.

Other features of our outdoor time included different groups engaging in dramatic play especially family oriented games...

As well as interactions with some of the other classes of different ages, holding their own in conversations with groups of children from outside the Cardinal class.