Catching up on January

Catching up on January:

The Week Of January 8, 2018:

We hope you had a healthy and joyous time with family and friends over the break. Although it was nice for us as well, we are so happy to have everyone back in school.

This week we continued the theme of All Around our Community as we learned about the different kinds of communities where people live.  We learned some people live in the city, some live in the country, some live in a town, and others live on a farm. We learned about some things that are the same in each community (Ask your child - hint: children go to school; people have neighbors; people can grow a garden) and some things that are different (hint: cities have buses and busy streets with crowds of people trying to get from one place to another usually quickly; the country has more wide-open spaces with grass and trees, etc.)

During Literacy Circle and Small Group this week, we focused on rhyming words (words that have the same sound at the end). We found them in our weekly poem, and enjoyed many laughs together finding them in our small group game. We needed to have our best listening ears on to be able to hear which words really rhymed!

During Math Circle and Small Group this week, we reviewed all that we learned throughout this unit about geometric shapes - cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, rectangular prisms; and we experimented to make new shapes. (Ask your child why some shapes stacked better than others.)

Our story this week was The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin.  Some

people like to grow food; others like to grow flowers. Ask your

child why this one neighborhood decided to grow both!

Talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., gave us an opportunity

to help the children learn that working together and

always striving for peace is the best way to live in any

community.

The week of January 15, 2018:

This week we began our unit all about Farm Life. We started out by talking about the many aspects of the farm in terms of day to day life on a farm, the animals that live on the farm and if we would like to live on a farm. Most of us decided that we would like to live on a farm and help take care of the animals. We also worked on the letter Gg this week as well. We are working hard on writing our letters with many different mediums from crayons, pencils and even dry erase markers. We love using the white boards!

This week we enjoyed playing in the dramatic play area which was set up as a barn scene. We played with barnyard animal puppets and could even wear animal masks to act out some farm yard fun!  We loved getting to act out our favorite farm animals with our friends. We also enjoyed playing with toy farms and animals as well as the items in the sensory table. So much farm fun to be had!

During small group time we worked on writing the letter Gg, identifying things that began with the letter Gg and working on the sound that the letter Gg makes. We also worked on identifying the beginning sounds of many words. This was a little tricky so we are going to keep working on it over the next few weeks.

During math circle we talked about the many ways we can make 5. We used various counters to demonstrate how the number 5 looks the same no matter what we used. We enjoyed adding items together in different orders to make 5 and realizing that the final number never changed! We really enjoy learning all about numbers.

Thank you for donating all of the great supplies that were brought into the class this week. We appreciate them all so much. They really do help us out so much. We could not make the class as great as it is without your help and support!