Thursday Happenings

May 16th, 2013

While it drizzled outside, the children were creating an exciting spring scene in our classroom. We started our morning in library with Gwen reading a funny story about prairie dogs which had the children glued to the action packed story.

Returning to the classroom, everyone was excited about the progress we have made on our beautiful spring mural. Yesterday and early this morning we set up the sky, the grass, a beautiful tree, and even soil under the grass. Noticing our attention to all the important aspects of the natural world we had set up, Stella's mom Kristina, a science teacher here in the AFS Upper School, asked if she could come talk to the children about soil. After library, Kristina came into our class and talked to us about soil and all the ways that soil is necessary for all growing things. She not only talked with us about how you might need soil for gardening, but also all the interesting organisms that live in soil! She asked us to think about how important all the living things in the soil are, and how important it is to take care of the soil. She left us materials to look at that show us magnified pictures of these tiny organisms, and we look forward to exploring them and researching them further! She even shared an interesting idea for the soil on our mural which we will be beginning soon, so we will incorporate all of this as we add to our beautiful display. After our visit with Kristina, the children became busy in the studio creating flowers and assisting in adding their depictions of spring to the collaborative mural in progress.

The fondness of flowers blossomed fully as the children became engaged in our new flower shop in the dramatic play area. Equipped with bases and flower pieces, the children created bouquets. Other children found their roles in this area as well, using clipboards and pencils to take orders from their teachers and friends or over the phone. A great display of cooperation and appreciation for each other was felt as the children interacted in this transformed space.

We enjoyed our outdoor time, soaking up the sun and bonding with one another as the freedom to move and explore created limitless games with the children running, climbing, digging or gathering and socializing. 

Wonderful Wet Wednesday

May 8th, 2013

Our Wednesday began with Library with Gwen. The children were invited to find a seat in a circle around her reading rug, and Gwen introduced us to a book based on the Miss Mary Mack clapping game rhyme. Along with the wonderful, silly story, the children enjoyed trying out this new type of play before selecting some new books to bring back to the classroom and enjoy this week.

Settling into our classroom, we noticed the raindrops outside seemed to inspire water based play and the children continued to work with the vibrant water colors we have been enjoying this week. In other areas of the classroom, children pondered what sort of things happen when it rains, and drawings and paintings of growing flowers were gathering in our art studio.

When we noticed the rain outside seemed to have stopped, we quickly paused our work to put on our boots and headed out to see how the rain might have affected our outdoor classroom.

We discovered many interesting effects of rain on the outside space including large mud...

Slippery stumps...







And large puddles that created a fun new opportunity for the Cardinal builders to explore bridge creations.

After we had had our fill of the water soaked outdoor area, we returned inside to settle our bodies with some more Choice time. Having seen the interest in flowers that has taken hold of the Cardinal class, artificial flowers made an appearance complete with foam blocks, and groups of children tried their hand at creating flower arrangements and bouquets!

We are excited to extend our study of flowers and incorporate our learning and interest into new learning centers in our classroom.  We are planning on converting our Dramatic Play area into a flower shop!  The children are excited to plan and change our creative, role play immaginative area. If you have any ideas or props that would help us, please let us know!   We are also going to start to plan how we want to use the two, large  raised beds in our garden that are dedicated for our class.  Planting flowers feels like such a natural  extension. We will discuss our options gardening and will keep you posted!

Tuesday News

April 23, 2013

The children began their day with a few calm activities around the classroom. The atmosphere was quietly buzzing with busy Cardinals demonstrating their self assured knowledge of the different areas of the classroom and the comfortably confident children found great places to get to work building, reading, or exploring the art studio.

Soon it was time to take a short walk over to Gwen's Library where the children gathered in front of Gwen to listen to a story about friendship called "Help!". This story, includes the adventures of mouse who learns an important truth about his friendship with his animal friends. The book was well known to the Cardinals but, as always, the children were able to bring original perspectives to the story based on their own experiences. We left Gwen's Library after a fun, stimulating discussion carrying new books to fill our classroom with fresh ideas.

Back in the classroom, books came alive for the children. Exploring new stories and filling their thoughts with new illustrations seemed to engage each and every child both through small group readings with one of the Cardinal teachers, and individual book perusals.

We decided instead of a usual morning meeting we would take that time to surprise Paula with a special card the children had created for her. We had missed Paula who had been out from school and wanted to find a way to show our love and excitement for her return! Each Cardinal had written a personal message inside the card and decorated it with care, and the pride and joy the children took in making Paula smile was wonderful to see.

After a quick group hug, the children dispersed to different activities of interest, set up today around the classroom. There was a fun cutting and gluing art activity exercising our fine motor skills that drew on themes of recycling from yesterday's Earth Day discussions. We used materials that hadn't been used after finishing previous art endeavors to create new, beautiful pieces.

There were magnetic math games that explored shapes and numbers set up on the front rug that invited friends to work together or individually to try out different configurations of shapes and lines, or matching and ordering numbers.

The mathematical missions continued with geo-boards and child-driven shape experimentation which even led to creative applications from beautiful shape designs to self devised geo-board-games that included several different friends in interactive social math play.

We completed our terrific Tuesday with a little fresh air and outdoor play.