Fantastic Friday!

May 3rd, 2013

Today was a Friday full of celebration! Trace came to school excited to share his birthday with all of his friends, and the whole group was excited  in  anticipation of the Arbor Day celebration happening this afternoon.

With all of this to look forward to, morning choice time had a special energy. Interest in writing is continues to grow at the Writing Center and children are even starting to try to write the Question of The Day on their own!










Our flower study has inspired children to draw and practice fine motor skills . Several friends are drawing detailed flowers and are using our flower diagram and  flower model to reference facts and information that they are trying to understand.  It is very exciting to observe our active learners!

In the Math area,  there was a game being invented that involved finding the "monster number". Players are given two different numbers and need to circle the larger "monster" number.This again, led to a writing experience where children were practicing writing and copying numbers.









There was some teacher help involved, but these independent Cardinals were fast learners and were soon playing this game with one another, choosing two numbers on their own.

Mid morning we had a visitor ! Trace's dad had brought delicious ice cream for the children to share in honor of Trace's birthday. The Cardinals lined up for a chance to take a bowl of ice cream and choose from the amazing number of different delicious toppings Trace's parents had set up for his Cardinal classmates to enjoy.

Their sundaes in hand, now loaded with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, bananas, chocolate chips, sprinkles, and a little whipped cream, the children gathered at the tables and sang to Trace who glowed with joy waiting to blow out his "4" candle.

Their energy was given an extra boost after the birthday fun, and there was really only one thing left to be done on a beautiful sunny day like today, so we headed outside and the children ran, and jumped, and laughed, and climbed until their lungs were full of fresh air.

Heading back inside, we read a few stories on the front rug before lunch. We relaxed with books on our nap mats after lunch to get a short rest before heading outside again for the Arbor Day celebration!

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.