Monday News

May 6th, 2013
Coming into school this morning, the children found areas to work in and it became apparent that our creativity was flowing freely.

 In addition to the usual morning routine components of sign in and journal writing, the classroom was set up with a few painting projects and the children were eager to get involved creative work!

At our morning meeting, Paula shared with the Cardinals some materials she had found over the weekend. The children's eyes grew wide as Paula opened up bags of beautiful flower petals of all different colors.

With these soft, fluttery materials the children began working on beautiful pieces of art using watercolors, glue, and some glitter sand.

With the petals, all of these materials came together to create wonderful collages that reflected the spring weather.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of other activities happening including "Guess My Letter!!" on the front rug...

 As well as individually driven writing activities like book making or comic book style picture drawings.

After enjoying a busy morning in the classroom we moved outside and the children were involved in creative imaginative play in several different areas of our outdoor classroom.  The children love to see and play with their friends outdoors  and the amazing spaces we have support the development of interpersonal and social relationships in such a special way.  

Tuesday News

Interest in Building Continues to Evolve...

At Morning Meeting we re-visited the Language Experience chart we created last week where we identified all different types of buildings we could think of.  How do we begin to extend our thinking and the scope of our study? What comes next...?  We began our morning discussion by asking the children to think about what they thought buildings were made of, and as the children excitedly called out various 'materials' we decided to begin a new Language Experience chart.  The children are most interested in seeing their spoken words in print and the process of recording their ideas on large paper seems to be quite interesting for our children. Some of the responses were:
            Wood
             Steel
             Flowers
             Metal
             Glass
             Bricks
             Glue
We introduced a beautiful book series titled  Houses Around The World by Debbie Gallagher.  Each book describes how there are many different types of homes around the world  and that homes provide shelter for people.  Homes Around The World  presents five different types of homes in each book.  The tiles in the series that we looked at were: City and Country Homes, Cave and Underground Homes, Mud, Grass and Ice Homes, Portable Homes and Castles and Mansions.  These books have beautiful photographs of homes around around world and were a wonderful launching pad for conversation and further study.

In small groups children continued to work with small shapes to create their own buildings. They used different color plastic shapes to design their buildings and then had the opportunity to describe their work. They glued the shapes onto heavy cardboard when they were ready to make their buildings more permanent.

At our Math center, children were interested in building towers with small colorful, stackable caps.  We placed 4 individual small ice trays and a basket full of colored caps on the table and observed as the children were drawn to the center.  Children explored the caps by scooping up hand and armfuls of caps from the basket and then the "play" seemed to take a more intentional turn. Children then took a small handful of caps and started to sort them by color into the ice trays. Other children carefully stacked them one by one on top of each other  creating tall towers. One child made stacks of red caps, purple caps, and yellow caps of different heights.  This was a perfect time to begin to introduce concepts associated with comparison; more than, less than, and same as.

Language Activities

We introduced new alphabet stamps and stamp pads today at the Writing center.  The children had the opportunity to stamp letters and practice letter recognition skills.  At the journal table we worked on our final entry in our Herb Journals.  The children had the opportunity to observe their oils (if they were still at school) and respond to the question " What do you think you could make with the herbs or what did you already cook with the herbs ?"  This was a fun way to close our herb experiment and observations and to practice expressive language skills, observation skills and fine motor skills. Families are welcome to take home their herbs this week!

Surprise Party For Christina!

We learned that today was Christina's birthday and we planned a surprise party for morning snack! The children helped to make a beautiful birthday card and we had birthday cake for snack.  We filled Christina's cake with candles and presented her with flowers and cards for her birthday. It was very special to share this day with Christina.  Her parents brought her special "Cardinal"  gifts  (a Cardinal thermometer and a Cardinal finger puppet) which she shared with all of her Cardinal friends.

To finish our morning time together, we played in the common shared area  (the Commons) outside our classroom today. The children enjoyed the open space where we could build with the large blocks and work with the long cylinders.  This worked out so well, especially because we did not go outside due to wet weather. We read before lunch which was a great way to close our morning conversation about buildings and homes.  The children were asked to talk with their families about the materials that their homes are made of ... please join in our discovery and exploration of this study.  Families are also welcome to bring in a photograph of their house or of other buildings that the children are interested in!

Pictures hopefully coming soon..Our Tech Department is working on the problem!

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.