A Trip through Friday with Pictures

 Spanish with Alicia

 

Painting and Building during Choice Time

Outdoor Play and Shared Read-Aloud

 

 We ended our morning with a wonderful shared story called Thank You, Thanksgiving by David Milgrim. This story displayed the feeling of gratitude that this time of year brings to the surface. The main character in this story, a little girl, went on a journey to the grocery story, identifying and sharing thoughts on all the things that she was thankful for. We discussed how this holiday is also a time to share food and experiences with each other, including friends, family and extended people in our community. This connected so meaningfully to the end of the story when the little girl in the story used all of the items she bought at the grocey store to create a delicious pumpkin pie for her family to eat together. Then, they spent time reading, playing and talking with each other, just enjoying the company of one another. 

Our day was filled with fun, discovery and excitement. Our creative sides continued to shine through as artists painted masterpieces in the studio area. In addition, elaborate structures were built using cooperation, teamwork and patience. The Cardinal Class is ready for a special visit from Carlito's dad, Carlos, who works in construction. We are looking forward to the information and ideas he can share with us about his work. We have even created a list of questions to ask. Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Learning through Imaginative Play and Literacy

Here comes the train...

The Cardinals arrived in our classroom, creating their own trip on a train inside the cubbies! Noticing this interest, the teachers invited the children to assemble seats and construct their very own train in the bigger block area. This led to adventures in traveling to different places. The Cardinals took on different roles including conductor, ticket collector, and passenger. They began asking questions such as "Can we go to Disney World?" or "Can we go to New York?" or "How about Bethany Beach?" and adding "What about Sesame Place?" The Cardinals even took to reading books about trains as they enjoyed their journey. The Cardinals identified problems and road blocks such as broken wheels that stopped the train in the tracks. They worked together cooperatively to find solutions to these problems such as using a forklift to lift the train up and fix it. This showed the mechanical and constructive minds developing in the Cardinal classroom! We are wondering where this interest in trains might take us including inquiring about different types of trains, reading fiction and nonfiction books on transportation and travel and beginning to identify train cars, parts and other parts of traveling such as stations and tickets.

Library with Gwen

Gwen invited us to visit the library today for our special time with her. She introduced us to a book about hats and a bear who was searching for his missing hat! This story brought smiles to our faces as the humor brought out our funny sides and bright personalities! We are developing listening skills during shared group reading experiences such as this. After the first story, Gwen introduced another story about hats by the same author! This one was about a hat that was found by a fish even though it wasn't his. We are enjoying reading with Gwen and connecting with her, building a deeper relationship and hearing her stories. She even shared an experience and sighting she had of a bear on a trip to Canada. 

Outdoor Time

Let's build and go on adventures:

Constructing a house and holding special events for each other:

Dancing and Freeing our bodies through movement:

We finished up our morning through a shared reading of one of the honor books given to the Cardinal Class called, It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw, which introduced the concept of different shapes representing real-life objects such as ice-cream cones, rabbits and an owl. We also read a kindness story called Nico and Lola by Meggan Hill,  about a relationship between a boy and a dog full of love and compassion for each other.

Peace In Our Day...

Paula was interested in sharing  the customs and traditions that her family experiences each year as they celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Preparing a beautiful meal for family and friends is always a favorite part of the holiday! Paula wanted to show the children some of the items that grace her dinner table each year during the holiday season.











She placed a large table cloth on our Meeting area rug and created together we created our own beautiful holiday table!







  Using special flower napkins, candles, flowers and gourds we transformed our classroom into a festive gathering spot.  Paula talked about  how special it was to share the New Year with her family each year, and how special it was to now share it with her new Cardinal family.

Paula lit the Sabbath candles and sang the special prayer that her mom would sing when lighting the candles to begin the holiday.  We listened as she shared the experiences she had with her own family and her boys when they were children growing up.  We looked at kiddish cups that belonged to her sons and we ate raisin challah and dipped apples in honey.  We learned that dipping the apples in honey symbolizes the wish for everyone to have a sweet and happy New Year.  We read Sound The Shofar! A Story for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by, Leslie Kimmelman which was a perfect book to read aloud for children of this age.  

Our I Was Wondering... question bulletin board is filling up with many, many thoughts. We were inspired to create a Question Board for many reasons.  Initially, we felt that this process was a way to acknowledge the children's thoughts. We believe that creating an environment which is rich in language and words supports and respects each child's ideas and is a meaningful way to begin to build a sense of community within our classroom.  This is the beginning of children learning to ask questions and engage in research.  The very first questions that were posted this year were about the sounds that cardinals make.  Today we revisited these questions and talked about ways that we may learn more about what we were curious of.  The teachers suggested using the Internet to see if we could Google bird sounds and fine the cardinal sounds. We engaged in an amazing listening activity where we listened to not only the sounds of Cardinals, but also of the bird sounds of all of our other Early Childhood friends!  We listened to Catbirds, Owls and Doves!  For a first day of bird listening, the children did great!  We will pursue this activity and see if the children  can discriminate different bird  sounds  and we will play some interesting listening games.  Below is the website we used to listen to Cardinal sounds. 

 Enjoy listening with your child and let us know how it goes!

http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=3