What a fantastic literacy week! We had a blast exploring the various characters and themes that Leo Lionni presents within his books. And we will continue literacy week through next week since there are still so many stories to be told and activities to be explored. 

Little Blue and Little Yellow

We read this story that highlights the beauty of friendship. Little blue tries to find his best friend, little yellow, and can't find her. When they are finally reunited, they hug so hard that they turn green! Then their parents can't recognize them and when they cry, the extra color leaks out and they are normal again. Their parents hug both their child and the best friend and now realize why they were green. It's a little bit friendship, a little bit color mixing, and a lot of fun with ripped paper illustrations. We will continue to explore this story next week with more color mixing and green focused art work. 

A Color of His Own

After observing images of chameleons, we set about creating our own with both watercolor and tempera paints. We also talked about our favorite colors and will be making a color book that will stay in our class library. This book also helps us talk about seasons, which is perfect as we transition from Winter to Spring. 

Swimmy

First we glued a "school" of fish together and then we used a special mix of tempera paint and salt over the fish and put them into the ocean. This story is about a brave little fish who encourages the other fish to work together and make themselves look big to scare off the predatory fish. Once we had finished working on our own wonderful ocean, we started to talk about sharks. We were so excited that we immediately cut out a shark and decided to paint it pink! This was such a great extension of what we were talking about (and also was inspired by our new favorite song, bebe tiburon). 

The Alphabet Tree

All of the letters in the alphabet tree learn that when they gather together they form words, sentences, and then very important thoughts. What a great message! We used various letters of the alphabet and glued them onto our own tree (you can view the tree right outside of our classroom door, to the right as you enter). 

Sharing our passion for reading with others

As literacy week came to a close, we visited the Infant-A classroom and read two Pete the Cat books with them: Wheels on the Bus and Old MacDonald Had a Farm. It was such a beautiful moment watching our big two year olds sing so gently and kindly to the babies, and use their hands so gently to caress and touch the babies' heads. We were excited all morning about our visit to the baby class! We will continue to forge a relationship with their class since it is something that brings us such joy and excitement. 

THANK YOU!

A very big thank you to all of our literacy week readers: Heidi, Kevin, Alyssa and Tina! We will have a few more readers next week as well since the snow day threw our schedule off a bit! 

And thank you for the tea cups (Mia's family), and the copy of "A Color of His Own" (Charlotte's family). 

A huge thank you for all of the new books we have in our classroom, especially our blossoming Spanish library! 

Other amazing stories we experienced this week: Over in the Meadow, Down by the Bay, Where the Wild Things Are, Twenty Big Trucks in the Middle of the Street, Tip Tip Dig Dig, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, Wheels on the Bus . . . . and so many more!! We read more books each day than we ever have before, and we were still getting requests for MORE books! This is exactly what we treasure seeing!

Highlights from the week:

Our super fun trip to Eataly to stretch mozzarella (again, thank you so much for coming with us and helping things run smoothly, especially with the mix up on which workshop we were going to be having!). 

Making vanilla frozen yogurt (Thank you Nico and family!).

We made mint smoothies with Diane.

During Spanish class we learned about Spain. We tasted Spanish olive oil on bread, got to try on a traditional Flamenco dancer outfit, and we listened to flamenco music and tested out castanets. 

Have an exciting weekend, and if you're already on your way to vacation- have a great time!! 

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