Stupendous Thursday!

Thursday June 6th, 2013

Our classroom had more visitors today than we have had all year! Everyone brought a snuggly friend with them to school and our classroom was filled with happy friends sharing their favorite lovies with one another.

After morning meeting, we began our day with another classroom visitor. Lilly had brought with her not only her gigantic elephant lovey, but her mom, Alix, as well! Alix is a type of scientist called a geologist, and she brought with her a fun activity to share with the children some of her knowledge. She showed everyone some of the tools a geologist might need including a tool called a hand lens which is a tiny magnifying glass which she uses to look at rocks up close. Alix not only studies rocks found here on earth, but also what can be found on other planets. She brought a book with her to share with the children about the moon, and we talked about how we study other planets in our solar system. She even showed us a picture of Mars that she herself took by sending a message from her computer to a rover that was visiting the planet!

The experiment she brought to share with us looked at how craters are created. Alix explained that there are many many rocks in space that come from other planets, sometimes from craters making other craters, or from when our solar system was formed. These rocks sometimes run into planets or moons, and this makes craters. Alix brought an activity with flour covered in a layer of green sand. Taking turns, everyone was allowed to choose a ball of different sizes and weights and dropped them into the sand and flour as if they were rocks hitting a planet out of space. After dropping the "space rocks" the children discussed what they observed with Alix.

                                                                       

Our scientific Thursday continued with a visit to our middle school friends in Violet's mom, Kristin's science class.  We enjoyed the wonderful invitation from the Middle School to experience volcanic eruptions. They walked us through this hands-on process and interacted beautifully with the children as chemical reactions were created mixing together baking soda, vinegar and food coloring. The Middle School Science class even sculpted their very own volcanoes using modeling dough and shared with us their idea of giving them to our class as gifts so the Cardinals can try out this new experiment at home. Look for the volcanoes and a letter coming from the our Middle School friends in days ahead!                                                                  

Tomorrow is our Spring Concert - "I Dream A World of Blue". We will be having a full rehearsal with the lower school tomorrow morning and the performance and art exhibit will take place in the afternoon. Please see below for details:

I Dream A World Of Blue
An AFS Early Childhood and Lower School Spring Program

Friday, June 7, 2013
1:30 p.m.
Abington Friends School Muller Auditorium

~ Spring Program Performance Attire ~
All lower school students should dress in black shirts and long, black pants.  Students are welcome to add a blue accessory as a way to connect to our program theme (a blue bowtie, blue hair accessory, a blue scarf, etc.)  We encourage students to be creative with this choice!  Students are welcome to bring their concert attire clothing to school onThursday, June 6, 2013.  All students will be given the opportunity to change at schoolon Friday morning prior to the performance.  
Please note that all students will be involved in movement activities on stage and should wear pants and comfortable shoes (no heels, sandals or flip flops please).
We look forward to celebrating our accomplishments with you on Friday, June 7th in the AFS Muller Auditorium beginning at 1:30 p.m.

Thank you for all the support and help that the Cardinal Families have provided us this year. We look forward to the next few days and the special events that will be taking place. 

Tuesday News

May 7th, 2013

The morning began with the children preparing for an outdoor Meeting for Worship with all of Lower School. The wet, grey weather could not dampen the community spirit and everyone walked outside and spread out in a circle facing one another and listen to a story about nature, and our partnership with the natural world. After the story, the 1st graders sang a song to acknowledge a close to our MFW time and the classes returned to their mornings.

Back in the classroom the children gathered on the front rug for a quick morning meeting and were pleasantly surprised by a visit from some of the Catbirds. The Catbirds came in wearing chef hats and invited us to come to their pancake restaurant. They had received a gift of home made syrup and decided to share this gift with all of their EC friends!

The Catbirds returned with a special delivery of delicious fluffy pancakes and a container of the home made syrup and we enjoyed the treat together picnic style.

After morning meeting, the children dispersed for some open choice time. There were again beautiful water colors being painted in the art studio and the originality in the way some of our Cardinal friends dealt with color was inspiring.

A hands on scientific exploration was happening at another of the back tables. Children were invited to use their senses to examine several different types of flowers.

They could feel the petals, open up the flower tops, and even look at planted seeds under magnifying glasses and see the parts of the flower we have been identifying since our time with Roseanne. The children loved this chance to get up close and personal with something we have been studying, and explore these plants in any way they felt they wanted to.

After a productive choice time, we headed outside where the weather had finally cleared up and the day had become beautiful and sunny.

Thursday News

May 2nd, 2013

Like the flowers that have been popping open all at once outside our windows these days, the Cardinal classroom's academic spirit is in full bloom! The children have been showing off their true academic colors in many different areas from scientific examinations of different flowers, to letter  games brought to us from both our Cardinal Teachers and our Cardinal families.

Kate came to school with us a real sunflower and, since we all now have been seeing flowers through a scientific lens thanks to our friend Roseanne's lesson, we conducted a scientific examination of the parts of this Sunflower finding what is different looking or the same between this flower and the flowers we had been looking at before. With some extra help from Kristina, Stella's mom who is also a science teacher at AFS, we found the flower sections we were hoping to identify and learned a little more about the differences.

The morning began as the children came into the classroom and found materials set up for them to use. Large alphabet tiles shared the front rug space with small letter tiles. One set with uppercase letters, the other lower case letters.

The children began their letter explorations on their own, spelling their names or arranging the letters in alphabetic order, and once in a while a Cardinal Teacher would come with an idea or suggestion. The children began spelling out their families for each other, sounding out the names of their loved ones as well as words like "Mommy" and "Daddy".

The sounds of children carefully slowing down the sounds of words to identify the different letter components could be heard from the front rug to the back tables where the children were continuing the book making project that had been started this week.

A different group of Cardinals who had been inspired by their friends who had started this activity yesterday were hard at work thinking of imaginative stories and then finding ways to express their stories in written form, trying out making sound to letter associations!

Finding even more ways to expand our growing need for intellectual stimulation, our friend Violet shared with us a letter game her Mom and her play during bath time. This game show style activity goes by the name of "Guess My Letter!!" and involves one player picking up a letter (we used our handy letter tiles) and hiding it from view. Then the hider gives a few words that feature the hidden letter at the beginning, and the other player has to Guess That Letter!! It was a fun adventure finding several word examples for each letter to help the guesser, and I am sure "Guess My Letter!!" will become a favorite of the Cardinal classroom and led to an interest in other letter and number focused games!

We decided to finish our morning outside and immediately it became apparent that today was going to be a "jump right in" sort of outdoor playtime...

Confidence was not left behind in our classroom when we put down our letter writing pencils and changed into our water stomping boots and the water pond was a focal point for the majority of our class.

Other features of our outdoor time included different groups engaging in dramatic play especially family oriented games...

As well as interactions with some of the other classes of different ages, holding their own in conversations with groups of children from outside the Cardinal class.

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.