Monday News

May 13, 2013

The children were excited to begin their morning working on their journals. Weekend News has become a favorite spot on Monday mornings and the children are eager to share their experiences and adventures they have had with their families over the weekend with each other.

As the children are developing reading readiness skills where they are able to discriminate the different sounds of words and are beginning to make letter sound connections, we are observing beginning kid writing. Story dictations continue to support language development and literacy skills and the children enjoy sharing their ideas  during this time.

The beginning literacy continued after journals with children working with magnet boards and letters trying out different combinations of letters to create words.

The rest of our classroom was experiencing amazing imaginative play this morning. The kitchen area began to resemble a shop as the children made use of a cash register prop. This has been the first step to converting some of our classroom space into our goal of a flower shop.

The magnet tiles had an interesting group of structures being built, and the builders seemed very comfortable with friends stopping by to admire or add their own ideas and moving on.

These comfortable social interactions were happening in other sections as well, as groups gathered to dress up and create dramatic play scenarios focused on the family unit, and everyday experiences of families. Some friends shared new games they had played over the weekend with their families as well.

There were paintings being created in the art studio, as well as the very beginning steps of tracing and cutting out shapes for a large art project we are planning on starting soon.

Friday News

May 10th, 2013

This morning we really embraced the Nature theme we have been building on for the past few weeks. Trace's mom, Melissa brought a gift for the class from her garden center of various garden materials like pots and planters and watering cans, and these combined with the fake flowers we have been enjoying have inspired talk of converting our play house into a Cardinal Flower Shop!

Besides discussing our future flower shop, there was lots of colorful building, group reading, and other areas of business.

Our spring theme continued at the journal table with a journal question that asked what we have been observing about the growing plant life, and there were several thoughtful ideas preserved in illustrations in our journals.

After a few friends had done amazing work in their journals about observations they had made, we decided we would continue this work outside and maybe find some new observations. We took our snack with us and enjoyed a long play time in our outdoor classroom.

The children laughed and played, and when they came across something that particularly inspired them, they had the option of recording it in their journals.

Mid morning, we took a break from the beautiful outdoors and went inside to meet Sam in her art studio and she had with her the painted cylinders we had worked on the last time we had met.

This time the children had the opportunity to begin to make the cylinders colorful with several interesting techniques, painting with brushes, their hands, and even a fun rolling motion putting paint in a box and then rolling the cylinders inside to create a marbled effect.

After art with Sam, we reflected on our early morning in a brief Meeting for Worship style meeting on our rug, and then went back outside to finish our morning.

Monday

April 29th, 2013

This morning the children came to school determined not to let the grey drizzle that was happening outside dampen their enthusiasm for learning. The children wrote journal entries about their weekends and filled the pages with colorful depictions of their thoughts.

They also worked on some longterm projects like self portraits in the art studio, and our wire basket sculpture which has somehow become even more colorful!

After a busy early morning choice time, the whole class came together for a morning meeting. In meeting our friend Xander shared with us a book called Ben Franklin and the Magic Squares. Xander was excited to share this book with the class and we enjoyed reading it together and learning about this very famous man.

Then we talked about the month we are in right now, April. We discussed how we are at the end of this month and that soon we will be in a completely new month of May. With this in mind, we thought about beginning a new study based on things we as a class are interested in right now. And so it is with plenty of excitement that we begin looking at how April showers might bring May flowers!

Our wonderful science teacher heard of our interest and invited us to her resource room for a special science class to look more closely at flower. She was amazed at what the Cardinals already knew and showed us a model and diagram of a flower so we could start to identify the different parts. The Cardinals were very interested in the pollination process and how this helps in the formation of new flowers. After our discussion, Roseanne invited us to explore the Science Room and the Cardinals immediately looked at books, began asking questions about the tanks and animals inside and examined some starter plants created by another class. During this free time, great questions were asked and the Cardinals displayed their wealth of knowledge and how curious they are in our environment and the living things that are a part of it.

We returned to our classroom to finish up our choice time work before lunch. Around lunch time the children felt they'd like to stretch their legs before sitting down to eat so we walked to the front of the Lower School as a group and escorted our half day friends out, waving to them as they walked to their cars. At the front door we ran into the half day friends from the Owl classroom who had just finished reading a book about a young mouse who wants to join her school chorus. We had never heard of this book, so the Owls let us borrow it to read before lunch. After reading the story, we talked about what a chorus is and how someone can learn how to sing for a chorus and Christina shared with us that she has been teaching voice lessons this past week to kids who want to learn to sing, like the main character in the story. The Cardinals were interested in the singing process so we did a quick singing lesson explaining what some of the exercises a vocal student might practice that can help someone learn how to warm up their voices for singing experiences like what happen in the story.