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Friday, November 9th

Our November portraits and self portraits are up! Come and take a peek at all of the progress we have made since September!

Painting & Our Emotions

This week we started to connect emotion to color and painting. Although only two friends have gotten to work on their canvas painting so far, our conversations have been productive.

Roger went first.

“Roger, how are you feeling today?”

“Good!”

“That’s great, I’m glad you’re feeling good. What colors do you like to use when you feel good?”

“Blue. No—green!”

And so he set to work creating his painting with blue, yellow and green. He made loops and circles as he covered the canvas.

Then it was Belle’s turn.

“Belle, how are you feeling today?”
”Happy!”

“What colors do you use when you are happy?”

“Clear. This one (white). Blue. Orange.”

She mostly focused on using blue paint, but really enjoyed watching the paint swirl together on the little palette before she applied it to her canvas. Belle used more dots and dashes and long strokes of the paintbrush while in her happy mood!

Next week we will continue exploring the correlations to color and mood/emotion and hopefully have our gallery of feelings up before the conferences next week. What colors do you associate with each emotion?

Field Trip!

This week we also had our paint-focused field trip to the Craft Studio on Duane St. First we did some free painting with a variety of different tools including stamps and rollers. Then we got to work on our aprons, with our first initial on taped onto the front. We will be using these aprons/smocks for our cooking projects this year! During the trip we also had a dance party and sang some songs with the different instructors at the studio. We love learning about new methods of painting, and seeing the kids really enjoy themselves and be free and open with materials is the best we can possibly ask for! Thank you to the chaperones who helped us out with the children during this trip- we truly appreciate all of your help!

Clay Time!

This week we did something new with our block of clay- we added water to it! This created a slick and slippery surface for our fingers (and lots of little muddy puddles for our hands to splash in). Next week we will discover how we can use this clay/water mixture to our advantage while we try to attach two pieces of clay together. The mixture is called slip. We will try to make little bowls out of clay coils and the slip mixture.

Science

Our science project this week is called “Walking Water.” We made three cups of water with food coloring: one red, one blue, and one yellow. We then twisted up paper towels and submerged them into two cups (one in the red and yellow, and one in the yellow and blue). Then we watched as the water climbed up the paper towels and started to mix in the middle where the two colors met!

Music

We continued listening to Peter and the Wolf this week and are starting to be able to discern the different musical instruments used in the composition. I feel that it’s especially helpful to be able to equate the instruments with the movements and sounds of animals, and we will continue to explore this next week before we move on to something new.

Specialists

This week we had all of our specialists!

  • With Ernestina & Eudenis we did the following Spanish songs: De la Cabeza a los pies, Si Estas Feliz, Familia Dedo, Bebe Tiburon, Los Colores

  • With Diane we made a tomato salad with green beans and chickpeas and added oregano and basil.

  • We had a different soccer coach this week, Coach R. We did a really fun game where we used the cones and balls to create ice cream cones and worked on our balancing skills (with our bodies and with the equipment).

  • We had an extra long music session with Emily this week after we got back from our field trip- we absolutely love that she asks us what songs we want to hear and allows us to move our bodies and use shakers and instruments as she plays.

  • Afternoon friends had yoga and karate this week as well

Bake Sale

I just wanted to thank everyone again for your support during our bake sale. We were able to raise $47 and we just placed an order for these fantastic books:

  • Chugga Chugga Choo Choo by Emma Garcia

  • I Stink by Kate McMullan

  • My Many Colored Days by Dr Suess

  • Mix it Up by Herve Tullet

  • Toot Toot Beep Beep by Emma Garcia

  • Subway Ride by Heather Lynne Miller

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Friday, November 2nd

Social Emotional Growth

We love seeing cooperative play happen organically in the classroom. Riley and John work together to create a house for the spiders.

A lot of social emotional related conversations have been happening in the 2A classroom this week. While we have been using a lot of songs and books to talk about our emotions, we are also witnessing first hand how our actions cause others to feel. We try to give children tangible examples of how they might have made someone else feel - for example, if someone has taken a special toy from a friend we might ask them, “How would you feel if your friend got to use your special toy and you said no?”

“That not make me sad. That make me angry!”

“I’m still using it!”

“Here, I’m finished.”

We have also been thinking about personal responsibility, and responsibility for things in our classroom. Lately we have noticed that a lot of our books are getting broken. The children love to run up to us and say, “Broken! Ripped!” So we are having conversations about how to keep our books safe so we can enjoy reading them again and again!

Our bake sale on Monday ties in to this a bit- if we realize that we have to work to make money to order more books, we get a bigger view on how the world works!

In our daily activities, we design projects that limit the amount of children that can work at one time to try and foster a little bit of patience and knowledge that even though we don’t have a turn right now, one is coming as soon as there is a space available. We know how hard it is to wait, so we don’t make them wait very long, but it is good practice!

“It is getting closer to me!!” - Finn (waiting for a turn to mix the cookie dough batter)

Some of us are starting to get interested in the potty - self care is a big part of our social emotional well being. We are practicing things like pulling our pants up and down when it’s time for a diaper, too. Please let us know if you are moving forward with potty training at home, and we will start bringing more children to the bathroom to try it out at school.

Painting

This week a new panel went up in the classroom all about our connection to painting so far- please check it out when you have a chance, and there’s an area on the panel for your participation!

And don’t forget next week we will be going on a paint related field trip - a reminder was sent out today.

Specialists

  • On Monday we had music for the first time! Our new music teacher’s name is Emily, and we all really enjoyed the music that she played with us. We were able to dance with scarves and play our own instruments, too.

  • On Tuesday we had Spanish with Ernestina and listened to some “spooky” songs for Halloween.

  • Also on Tuesday we made a “Monster Mash” of potatoes and carrots with Diane. We added some fragrant herbs as well- oregano, basil and rosemary.

  • We missed coach Jojo this week, but got a lot of exercise outside for the parade!

  • Afternoon friends had Karate and Yoga this week as well!

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Friday, October 26th

The past two weeks we have been getting deeper and deeper into our project work. Our costumes are finished, we’ve done a lot of fall and Halloween related activities, but now we’re also working on expanding our ideas about rocket ships and outer space, along with many painting provocations to help us get started as we build our own definition for paint.

Painting / Emotions

As our school wide intention for this year is paint, we have been doing a lot of exploratory work with this medium. Some of our recent work includes: painting with forks, painting with corks, painting with tubes, using spoons with a glue/paint mixture, using our hands to paint, painting on a variety of surfaces, using sponges to paint, and watercolor paint in both liquid and solid forms.

One recurrent theme that pops up while painting is that it creates emotions - a lot of children are very happy while they are painting, and a few are horrified if their hands or bodies get dirty in any way. Some children are focused and quiet, while others are fast and loud and laughing. We have made a point to follow the expressions on the children’s faces to help us capture more about the emotional connection we have to paint.

  • Next week there will be a panel all about painting, our research questions, and how we intend to work with and follow paint this year - please come in and check it out if you have the time! It will definitely be ready by next Wednesday when you’re here for the Halloween parade & party.

Rocket ships & Outer Space

A few new stories in our classroom have sparked even more conversation about space and the vehicles needed to get there. One book has little flaps to lift up and discover how astronauts can function while they are traveling through space. Another has really amazing images of real rocket ships, robotic arms, satellites, and everything else you can think of relating to space travel.

We have been working in steps- starting very small and making cork rocket ships, and now we are working on bigger ones using recycled tubes. Our goal is to try and make a rocket ship that we can get inside next!

Hopefully our parade next week with our rocket ship costumes will ignite more conversation!

How to get a book

John and Finn really enjoy reading the books Tip Tip Dig Dig and Tap Tap Bang Bang by Emma Garcia and have noticed that there is a book pictured on the back cover that we don’t have called Toot Toot Beep Beep. Today they mentioned it again, and we started talking about how we would have to order the book, but to order we need to have money. “We need money then we order it!” John expertly told us. So we started to talk about how we could earn the money. Rachel suggested that we could do some cooking and sell treats to the rest of the school, and Eudenis had an amazing idea- we could make cookies that look like stars and rocket ships! Finn really liked this idea, “I can make the rocket ship cookies!” So after the craziness of Halloween next week, we will start planning a small bake sale so we can order the book soon! Our first step will be creating a poster to announce the sale to the school - we can’t wait to see where this takes us!

Specialists

  • On Tuesday we had cooking with Diane. We created a magic potion by using a hand blender to mix apple and grape juice together.

  • On Wednesday we had soccer with Coach Jojo and continued to work on our listening skills and ability to use our feet with the soccer balls.

  • Friends who stay at school past 12:00 had Yoga and Karate this week

  • Next week we will meet our new music teacher, Emily! And we will continue Spanish with Ernestina (she mixed up times this week and skipped us! But we still do Spanish EVERY day with Eudenis before lunch time).

Project Work

  • During our music and movement project, we started listening to Peter & the Wolf! We learned about all of the characters and their corresponding instruments, and then we listened to the first few minutes of the story. On Monday we will continue where we left off and meet the cat, the grandfather, and the wolf!

  • For science we made a dough out of cornstarch and dish soap

  • For math, we worked with shapes to create the face of our jack-o-lantern!

  • We worked on making a jack-o-lantern face for cooking this week using rice cakes, sunbutter, banana slices and blueberries

  • We worked with model magic instead of clay this week and created a big pumpkin (we voted between making a pumpkin and making the earth). After squishing the model magic down into a circle, we added finger paint (red and yellow to make our own orange), glitter, and glue to seal it all together!

  • Building continues to be a very big interest in the class. The bristle blocks were especially interesting this week, and became a whole fleet of different boats and submarines! We also used magna-tiles to create more rocket ships!

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Friday, October 12th

“This is the way you go up to the rocket ship and this turns the rocket ship. There are two, two rocket ships! And the fire there, it’s a big fire! ”
— Finn

As we have started creating our rocket ship costumes, we have heard more talk about rocket ships in general. We even built in a “blast-off” move that we use during our races in the gym! Everyone seems to be most fascinated by the fire at the bottom, so we are going to look at that aspect of the launch and see why it’s there and what it does. We have also started creating our own little rocket ships using wine corks, gems, and paper “fire.” Eudenis and I are really excited to see where this project will take us!

We have continued to explore paint this week, and have added a few new tools to paint with. We used sponges one morning, and today we tried making apple prints. As we continue to introduce new ways to paint, we will be able to really hone in and focus on the children’s experiences with paint and how it changes their demeanor. We always notice that a morning runs more smoothly when we paint early in the day (and even better when we paint again later!).

Thank you to everyone who braved the weather and came with us to pick apples and pumpkins. It was really great being able to walk through the field and see how everything grows! I never realized how prickly the pumpkin vines were. We will continue to do a little more with apples next week (like plant the seeds since we still haven’t gotten to that!). And as we get closer to Halloween, we will start creating Jack-o-Lanterns and doing pumpkin experiments!

We would still love donations of: fall leaves, pinecones, and acorns if you happen to come across any this weekend.

Specialists:

  • Diane helped us make apples and pears with a citrus dressing this week. We juiced an orange and a lime and poured it over the apple and pear slices.

  • Ernestina played these songs with us: Buenos Dias, a weather song, a movement song, a song about emotions, and our favorite- hasta mañana

  • Coach Jojo had us continue to practice using our feet to kick the ball into the net this week.

Reminders:

  • Our annual Halloween parade is Oct 31st at 9:30 AM - please let us know if someone will not be able to attend with your child

  • We will have a party in the classroom directly after the parade (I believe Lisa and Renata emailed about this).

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Friday, October 5th

Our image of the child, as educators, is that they are brilliant, competent and capable young people. The children in our 2A group have continually blown us away with their creative thoughts, caring natures, and bursts of joy. Eudenis and I already feel as if we have always known your children - their personalities are so bright and happy! Now that we know them pretty well, we are also trying to ask questions and make observations to find out what each child thinks and knows about themselves. While our self-portrait time touches on it a little bit, we wanted to devote more time to speaking about what we observe in the mirror. How do we know that it’s ourselves looking back? What do we see? What are our characteristics? We are starting with the obvious: physical characteristics. Here are some of their preliminary thoughts:

“Hair is white! Eyes, they’re white-blue. I wear this one (pulls her shirt a little).”
— Sloane, 2.0 yrs
“Blue eyes. Body.”
— Riley, 2.3 years
“Hair (touches hair gently), eyes.”
— Manuela, 2.3 years
“My hair red. Red. Eyes black. Wear shoes. Socks.”
— Grayson, 2.4 yrs
“Eyes. Blue. Nose!”
— Barak, 2.1 years
“I don’t know! It’s brown (her hair). I like some cookies. Mine eyes is black. Cheeks. That’s just my clothes. They’re just things.”
— Kennedy, 2.4 years
“Yellow hair. Yellow eyes. Blue eyes. I see Luca. Wearing pants. Arms.”
— Luca, 2.0 years
“Eloise’s eyes. My eyes. It’s my turn. Tongue. Ear. Teeth. A shirt. Blue pants. Wow! Hands.”
— Eloise, 2.2 years
“My hair is blue. No, it’s yellow. Eyes are red. I have nose. Roger’s tongue. I wear dinosaur (shirt). Socks! That’s Roger’s cubby there. A backpack there. One, two, six, four, five fingers. ”
— Roger, 2.4 years

We have also been talking a lot about how we can be great helpers and make our friends feel really good and happy. Cleaning the room and respecting the items that we have is one way to be a great helper, and makes it easier for everyone to find what they would like to use. We remind everyone that it’s easy to fall down and trip if everything is on the floor. Another way to make our friends happy is to share with them. As we get comfortable the word “MINE” and “NO!” have been popping up a lot more - and while it’s great that we are using our words, we want to give everyone more language to use. Key things we tell the children they can say, “I’m using it.” “Please give that back to me.” “I’m not finished yet.” “You can use it after me.” “Don’t take that.” “Can I have a turn?” Sharing is a process that takes a while to really understand. It’s easy to facilitate sharing with an adult presence, but it’s another thing for it to be self initiated between the children. Through our practice with teacher help, we are giving the children the tools they need to be able to share on their own. We also make sure to let children know that it’s OK to say no if they are not ready to give a toy to a friend, and we’ve also been helping children find something to use and/or do while they are waiting for a turn.

This week we started three of our specialists! (We are currently on the hunt for a new music teacher, and that will start ASAP).

  • Ernestina is our Spanish teacher. This week we learned songs about emotions, weather, and hello/goodbye.

  • Diane is our cooking teacher. We made an “apple salad” using apple, orange, and lemon juice.

  • Coach Jojo is our Super Soccer Star coach. We are starting off with basics which will hopefully help us not use our hands as we play.




Some of our weekly activities included:

  • Reading! This week we really loved the books Go Away Big Green Monster! and Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

  • Clay - this week we added popsicle sticks to our block of clay and used them as knives and as candles.

  • Music and Movement - We continued listening to violin compositions, and also started listening to piano. We also added some games to our gym routines such as races (sometimes running, “swimming,” jumping, crawling, etc.), using the balance beam to be Humpty Dumpty and fall down, and scarf play in the classroom.

  • Cooking - we made “Pink smoothies” with coconut yogurt, strawberries and bananas

  • Math - we have been talking a great deal about shapes and drawing them this week and will work more purposefully with shapes next week

  • Science - we brought the fall weather into our classroom with pumpkins and gourds, and will continue to use these for project work as the month progresses.

REMINDERS:

We are closed Monday, Oct. 8th for Columbus day

Thursday, Oct. 11th is our Apple Picking field trip - we leave the school promptly at 8:30 and you need to have a carseat and bag lunch with beverages.

If your child goes home with a fever from school, or if they have one during the weekend, they need to stay home for 24 hours after the fever breaks. We are trying really hard to contain viruses and keeping children home when they are not feeling well really helps! Let’s keep everyone as healthy as we can. Thanks for your help and understanding.

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Friday, September 28th

Friday, September 28th

This week we really started to dive into our project work. It was the first time we found mail inside our mailbox, and we started to look at our world map and figure out where we are in relation to some of the schools we are going to be talking with! Everyone was very excited to contribute to the postcards we will be sending out very soon. We should also be receiving some mail from John who is traveling in Korea right now!

Some highlights of our week include:

  • Making sensory bottles (which have really been helping us identify one another and learn each other’s names).

  • Continued work with clay - and we started to see a shift from just touching the block of clay to utilizing the little pieces to build sculptures.

  • Making oobleck (cornstarch and water, which stays in a state between solid and liquid).

  • Starting to talk about and vote on what our class will be for Halloween (more details on this are coming very soon, we will need each family to bring in shirts/hoodies so we can create our costumes!). Right now we are voting between three separate ideas: Wild Things (like from the book), Pumpkins, or Astronauts and/or rocket ships. We will take our final vote on Monday.

  • Lots of painting - even with our feet!

  • Running and racing in the gym

This week I’d also like to introduce you to two separate school wide intent projects that we will be focusing on this year.

First, as teachers, we will be studying different ways children interact with and learn from paint. We will be closely observing and documenting the ways in which paint can allow us to express ourselves without verbal communication, but can also be a rich way to open up a dialogue and use our storytelling skills. As soon as Eudenis and I finalize our research questions, we will share them with you. And throughout our project, we would love to hear from you if you have any questions, input or ideas on how we can further our study! Also if you have any leads on field trips to museums or places where we can do some painting related activities, please let me know!

Our second intent will focus on a social emotional curriculum — which is something we always do with the two year olds anyway! For the first part of our year we will be looking closely at self-expression. During the next couple of weeks we plan on making an emotion book, talking about what makes us special and unique, and how we can care for ourselves and others.

Combining the two- one of our research questions will definitely be: When a child engages in a painting project, does his/her emotional disposition change? i.e. does a child who is having a difficult morning suddenly relax once painting is introduced?


Have an amazing weekend, the weather should be great! A few reminders:

-BMS is closed on Monday, October 8th for Columbus day

-Apple picking is Thursday, October 11th at 8:30 sharp

-BMS Annual Halloween parade on Oct. 31st at 9:30 with a lunch party when we return

Friday, September 21st

Friday, September 21st

This week we were able to really dig in to some rich curriculum since, on a whole, the separation process is getting easier and easier. We have even managed to get the children outside- both on a buggy ride to the park and on a walk holding the rope around the block. Eudenis and I are impressed! Everyone has been doing an amazing job listening and following directions even though these are activities that are completely new. We are really proud of our 2A friends!

For our music and movement project, we started off by listening to pieces of violin music (modern songs turned instrumental by the Vitamin String Quartet). As the violin notes filled the classroom, we took turns drawing what we heard. The lines and motions of the drawings made by the children really represented what we were listening to. There were short lines, circular shapes, and lines that looped up and down. We have the finished work hanging up in the classroom so you can view! We will continue to work with the violin next week, but we will pair it with a painting project to see how that influences the artwork.

Barak was particularly interested in spelling out V-I-O-L-I-N - we constantly talk about letters and the alphabet as we work.

This week we had our very first science experiment - actually, we did two in one day. First we mixed up a batch of playdough, and learned that when we add in an extra cup of water, it’s too slimy to play with! But it was really enjoyable to mix and add all of the ingredients together. We use: flour, salt, vegetable oil, cream of tartar (a stabilizer so we can keep it for a while), and food coloring or watercolor paint. Our second experiment was adding vinegar to baking soda. Each and every time more vinegar was added we got to see more bubbles! What a joyful experience!

If you’ve done any really fun experiments at home, please let us know- we are always looking for fun ideas to incorporate into the classroom.

On our buggy ride to the park we were able to take turns collecting leaves. This prompted a really wonderful discussion about where all of those leaves are coming from! Finn was so emphatic - “The leaves fall down! They fall down from the trees!” He also noted that the leaves were different colors, “I got a red one. I found a brown one. There was a yellow one!” And when it was Sloane’s turn to collect the leaves, she happily announced that they came from, “The trees!” Next week we will be using our leaf collection for some really fun art projects.

Another project that we started this week was making drawings for a class we will be penpals with in Australia! They are also a group of twos and their first mail to us is en route. We will be hanging up a world map and talking a lot about Australia as we prep for our package! And soon we will be sending post cards to ten other classes around the world! Our mailbox will be installed next week in anticipation.

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Other projects this week included:

  • Felt balls and ocean animals in the sensory table

  • Tempera painting - mixing red and yellow

  • Color mixing bags

  • Drawing with oil pastels, crayons and markers

  • Finishing our self portraits and taking our portrait photos

  • Yoga during circle time

  • Gluing tissue paper circles onto canvas

  • Starting to talk about class rules (we will revisit next week and sign with our hand prints)

  • Working with the block of clay

  • Reading — so much reading! The passion for books is huge in this group. Our favorite book of the week was Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Friday, September 14th

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Friday, September 14th

Wow, what an incredible first week of school! Each child is adapting and transitioning so beautifully into the classroom - thank you so much for your support! We are very excited by all of the possibilities opening up as we observe and document moments with your children. We have already seen a strong desire to build and create, a lot of interest in cooking and matching foods together, and a true passion for books and reading (in fact, it’s hard to stop reading because children run up to us with another book as soon as we finish the last book!). As everyone becomes more comfortable, we’ll only learn more about their interests and we will be able to build project work based on these expressed interests.

Each week, in addition to our on-going projects, we will also be focusing a little bit of our time on: Music, Movement and Literacy, Science, Cooking, Clay, and Math & Building.

Our first cooking related project was a taste test: what’s best, a red apple, a green apple, or a green and red apple? Only three friends were ready to taste, and each had his own opinion. Luca preferred the green apple. John enjoyed the red. And Roger liked the green and red best! It is great to learn that we can all like something and have our own preferences.

On Thursday we took out a big block of clay to investigate. We didn’t give any instructions or clues as to how to approach or use the clay. We wanted to see what would happen! Eloise immediately started to pull out little bits and lumps of the clay. Isabelle, sitting directly across from Eloise, did the same but collected the pieces together to create a ball. Luca was fascinated by the transference of clay from the block to his fingers. Roger and Kennedy approached cautiously and slowly built up the courage to really sink their fingers in to the cool and soft clay block. Finn wasn’t super interested in touching the clay himself, and instead decided to use a column block to roll the clay - much like a rolling pin. Barak liked the idea of using the roller, but twisted the idea a little bit to place the clay onto the block instead. Everyone had their own agenda, and worked intently without really talking about what they were doing.

Clay is one of my favorite materials. It really enhances each developmental area. There is the socialization and “scaffolding” by observing and learning from peers. Then there’s the gross motor and fine motor strengthening that is provided by the resistance of the clay. It’s harder to manipulate than playdough, so it’s really better for little fingers to get used to. We want it to be a little tricky. It’s also great for math (heavy, large, little pieces). Clay work is perfect for learning language and story telling as well. And it provides children with an open ended way to translate ideas into two or three dimensions! We will definitely be using clay each week!

For our math project this week, we started measuring our bodies. We each took a turn standing up against the wall and marked a line for each child’s height. Once a few friends return next week we will finish this initial step, and then use various objects around the classroom to measure with (ie- Barak is six blocks tall).

Other explorations this week:

  • Getting used to the upstairs gym

  • A lot of block building, magna-tile creations, building with pegs, and bristle block towers

  • Train tracks and roads being created all around the classroom

  • Sand and water play

  • Circle time - learning to sit together, and sing with each other

  • Puzzles

  • So much work in the kitchen!

  • Doctor play and giving medicine to the babies

  • Self portraits & taking portrait photos

  • Some of our favorite books this week include: Five Little Pumpkins, Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?, I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean, Five Green and Speckled Frogs, Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, Pete the Cat books, You are My Sunshine . . . and a whole lot more!

  • Spanish - we started with a good morning song (Buenos Dias), then listened to Bebe Tiburon (baby shark), and this morning we added Un Pequeno Dedo (One Little Finger), and finished up with Hasta Manana.

Next week we also hope to take our first adventure outside, and continue bonding with one another!

Have a fantastic weekend!

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