Thank you all so much for participating in our family curriculum event this morning, it was such a rich and valuable experience! We had such a great time exploring how many family members (and pets!) everyone has, enjoyed drawing family portraits, and we can't wait until you bring in stories that you create with your child so we can start illustrating.
I will send a follow up email with remaining activities to finish up over the weekend if possible!
Friendship and Kindness Garden
This week, in honor of Kindness week and No name calling week, we began creating still life paintings of flowers. We are going to use these beautiful artistic representations of flowers to make a classroom kindness garden. We got some amazing ideas from a few of our friends about how we can be kind and keep our friends happy while we are at school. Here are the first thoughts that we have brainstormed together:
- Jackson: I make them happy!
- Parker: I do sharing with friends.
- Mia: Dance with them!
- Nico: High fives!
- Emilio: Hugs.
- Katerina: Play.
- Dylan: Hugs!
We can't wait to share how this project evolves over the next week! We are also going to ask that each family come up with one Kind word and email it to us so we can add to our garden!
Box Play / Peek-a-Boo / Invisibility & Disappearing
Our invisible and disappearing project is continuing with two new boxes to explore in. We had some absolutely wonderful conversations this morning about what exactly our box is and what we can do with them and in them.
"The box turned into a bed!" -Nico
"It's something different- A silly box!" -Nico
"A silly silly box!" - Jackson
"Goodnight Mia sauce!" - Nico & Jackson
"It's a window. This my house. Jackson lives in house. Emilio too." - Jackson
"Nooo! This Mia's house!" -Mia
"Window!" -Emilio
"I see cars through window." -Jackson
I wonder what our box will turn into next week. We'll be reading the story "Not a Box" to gather more ideas and expand just how wonderful a box can be. Rachel will also be creating a box full of lights to see how this will change the trajectory of play for the children. We'd also like to have a box with mirrors inside to see what conversations it provokes!
Shapes! Circles!
Our shape study has landed on . . . . the circle! We are becoming experts in drawing circles, particularly for our self portraits (and the family portraits we made this week). We are going to revisit both circles and triangles next week and hopefully, weather permitting, we will be able to go out and find these shapes in our NYC environment. We will be taking photos of the objects the children find and creating shape books to keep within our classroom. We are also going to make a shape chart with numbers to represent how many sides each shape has. Numbers are a big topic in the classroom right now and we want to encourage as much natural counting as we can.
Specialists
This week we had Spanish with Maria, Soccer with Coach Jojo, Cooking with Diane, and Music with Evan. Here's a short recap from each specialist.
Spanish: We started singing about different vehicles and traveling, and we also continued to dress up the little girl in all her different layers for Winter.
Cooking: This week we took brave bites of ravioli! Our bites were sans sauce, but after we took a bite, we started adding: pasta sauce, mozzarella, oregano, and parmesan. To follow up and continue expanding on our cooking project, we will be making scent bottles with different spices!
Soccer: We are getting better and better at kicking the balls with our feet and not using our hands. We've also gotten so good at going up the stairs that starting next week we will have gym upstairs every day!!
Music: Evan introduced us to three different flutes this week. Two were made of wood, and one was metal. We noticed the differences in pitch and sound from the different flutes.
Assorted activities from this week:
- Mixing red and blue frozen ice cubes to create purple
- Clay: We used popsicle sticks and forks to create texture, cut, and manipulate the clay
- Reading Should I Share My Ice Cream by Mo Willems to continue talking about sharing and kindness.
- We made crackers with cream cheese and strawberries for snack and used our strong muscles to help spread the cream cheese and slice the strawberries.