Home Sweet Home

Dear Parents,

We began our week closing our eyes and looking in our mind's eye at the outside of our homes. We pictured what it looks like and asked, “What shapes do you see?” The class saw squares for windows, triangles and pyramids on rooftops, circles on doorknobs, rectangles on bricks, and so much more. We read My House, and My Nursery School. We made our own homes using paper shapes of rectangles, squares, triangles, and circles. We cemented them together using glue.
We went out to play in the yard, and some friends looked for shapes on the outside of Old First Nursery. They found squares, circles, triangles, and rectangles!

During circle we talked about who lives at our house. Everyone named their family members. Pets were included. While half the class did yoga with Amanda, we each got paper cutouts of our family members and used markers to decorate them. We talked about the sizes small, medium, and large when looking at our families. We asked the class “What can you tell us about your family?” The answers ranged from eating and playing games together, to ice skating and liking our family because they have backs. We glued our families into our paper home sweet homes.

We read Families, We’re Different , We’re The Same, The New Baby, Animal Homes, and Stellaluna. We’re reading about different kinds of families but also about what’s the same.

There has been lots of digging and building in the sandbox. Some children said they were building a skyscraper. “What’s a skyscraper?” someone asked. “When it’s so tall it scrapes the sky.” We all looked up. Others said they were building a home. Two of us said we would live there when it was finished, while others munched on pies and cakes made of delicious sand.

On Friday we all took turns using the Amazing Apple Peeler. It slices, it peels, and it cores the apples! All at the same time. We ate the peels for snacks, and one apple. We put the other apple slices into the oven to dehydrate, for the entire day. The children guessed what would happen to them in the oven. They wondered if their shape might change, or their color. We wondered if the smell would change. Someone guessed they would get harder. We compared our old orange peels we’ve been saving for many weeks to a fresh orange peel. They had changed in color and texture.

We have also been observing our pumpkin since Halloween. We put it in the yard in October and have been watching the changes as it rots and decomposes. The class said, “It’s smaller and browner!” The children have noticed our tree too. Friday someone said, “All the leaves are gone!”

Have a weekend!

Therese

Games with Friends

Dear Parents,

We played several games this week with our friends. We began with Red Light, Green Light. We hopped like frogs, slithered like snakes, raced like cheetahs, ran like humans, crawled like house cats, tigers, and lions. Everyone had different interpretations of crawling like crabs.
We read Pig Pig Grows Up, I Like Me, The Selfish Crocodile, It’s Mine! and My Tree and Me.

We played two rounds of Duck, Duck, Goose. Everyone remembered how to play from the first time. We looked at our chart on the wall and remembered that we sit in a circle. We ran around and around and afterwards went outside to play. While we were outside, we saw some tiny snowflakes.

While half the class posed in yoga class with Amanda, the rest of us read Little Blue, Little Yellow. Then we worked in pairs using blue and yellow paint. The children quickly noticed all our pictures turning green, just like in the book! We painted together and then everyone painted their own green painting.

Quiet time has been pretty quiet with half (or more) of the class sleeping regularly.

On Thursday we played outside the whole morning. In the sandbox friends made pies, mountains with security cameras, traps, and tunnels. During circle we read Frederick and The Greedy Python.

We read When I Feel Angry, Steps and Stones again, I Was So Mad, When Sophie Gets Angry, and Frog and Toad Are Friends. We have been talking a lot about what to do when we feel angry. We have learned from our books and from experience: take deep breaths, walk away, talk about our feelings, ask for help, count to ten, take a few minutes alone, and go for a run.

On Friday we played with our new play dough that we made earlier in the week, painted at the easel, and played a game of kickball. We looked at our picture from when we played before, and recalled the colors of the balls we used: red, orange, rainbow, dark blue, and bumpy blue. We began with one ball and added three more. We kicked up a storm, laughed a little, and went out to the yard to dig in the sandbox, climb, slide, swing, and run.

It was a good, active week,

Therese