Sunday, April 20, 2014

Ms. Lael's class Down on the FARM


Spring has ushered many a surprise for our Farm Room class. Out butterflies have hatched. Our plant has grown. And we even had visitors come in to say "hi". Ms. Shannon's puppies came, and our classmate Allie's parakeets came to say a warm "hello". It was such a treat for us to pet and hold those little critters. It was great learning about out furry and feathered friends and how we can take good care of them.



 

Music has also been an integral part of our learning process. The beats, tunes, and props definitely make it fun to learn about seasons, counting, animals and movement. Kinetic learning really developed our preschoolers' gross motor skills, and coupled with Ms. Sherry's singing, had our kids going! If it was up to them, we'd have music classes all week long!



 

In the Farm Room, we know that hands-on participation is key to solidifying what our preschoolers learn. Our Science Station teaches our kids about tinkering, putting things together, and cause-and-effect. Oh how our kids love to build!! Our activities have enhanced our preschoolers' fine motor skills. Our food-scented, gluten-free, non-toxic molding clay has been a great help for that, too!






 

Our preschoolers have definitely come a long way. We have almost mastered our Zoo phonics, colors, numbers and our songs. Our new classmates have also added a great deal of excitement and character in our class, as well. We love our new friends!
 
Ms. Lael & Ms. Shannon

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

SPRING has arrived in the FARM room!

Ms. Shannon has enjoyed stepping in for Ms. Wandy in her MWF afternoon FARM class while she is away on maternity leave.....CONGRATS Ms. Wandy on the birth of your beautiful baby girl, Jiselle. She weighed a very petite 5 lbs 2 ounces. Our class got to see her on Monday and she is absolutely beautiful!!!

WE MISS YOU Ms. WANDY!


We have been VERY busy learning AND having fun in the MWF afternoon FARM class! This week we learned all about SPRING. The students loved our lemon grass scented play doh and the flowers we brought for them to make flower arrangements in the play doh.



 
We filled our sensory bin with Easter eggs and practiced our fine motor skills using our rabbit tongs to pick up the eggs and fill the Easter baskets...this was definitely a favorite activity!
 
 
One of our science activities was "Sink or Float". The students all chose an object from a bag and had to PREDICT whether the object would SINK or FLOAT. This was very exciting for the students and many even guessed correctly!
 

Last week we learned about letter X. We read Fox in Socks and enjoyed learning about x-rays, xylophones and more!

 
 
The week before we learned about letter W including worms, weasels, watermelons & much more! The students got to play with some real worms and some of the students really loved that!
 
 

EEEEEWWWWWWW

We are enjoying some NEW furniture and equipment that we received in our classroom including new couches, a teeter totter, a kitchen....as well as some of the original popular favorites.
 


 
 
I am looking forward to the rest of the year with these adorable cuties. They are learning and growing so fast. Thank you for sharing them with us!
 

 

Ms. Shannon & Ms. Krysta

 




Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Guests come to Ms. Dessie's classes



Ms. Dessie's classes have recently had some great visitors coming into share and teach us some interesting and fun things.  We have had several animals stopping by.  "Storm" the rabbit easily made friends in the Ocean room with his very soft fur.  "Zig-Zag" and "Blue", the parakeets, can often be heard in the Jungle room competing for attention! Even with the blanket to cover them they often want to be heard. We have also had the opportunity to have caterpillars that turned into chrysalises and then Painted Lady butterflies!  We have even had worms for letter W!  Yes, real worms that many students wanted to bring home and I was all too happy to send them out the door :) Ms. Shannon  even brought in her cute little puppies that students got to hold and snuggle.  
But besides our feathered and furry friends we have had the opportunity to have some guest speakers/parents come into our classroom and share their cultures with us.  The students loved hearing about where these guests grew up, what kind of things they did and the languages they spoke. In fact, we having been learning some different languages, too.  Some classes are learning how to say "hello" in different languages and others how to count in Spanish.  We plan to showcase our skills at the graduation program.
Even with our guests and new languages we are still working hard on our handwriting and have made it through most of the lowercase letters.  We only have letters X and Y to cover and then each letter will have had a focus week.  We have readers at Totspot!  It is a thrill to hear students put the sounds together to form real words. The progress is exciting to see from the beginning of the year until now.  These students are ready to move on!


A sweet snuggle moment!

Learning how to use chopsticks.  Taught to us by Mr. Phan.

 Mr. and Mrs. Phan shared with us their Chinese and Navajo cultures. 
The Ocean room Unicorns- for letter U of course!  (Funny but none of the boys were interested in making one :)

Freeing our butterflies!

O Canada!  Mr. Tantrum shares about our neighbor to the North.

It was hard to give the puppies back!

Friday, April 11, 2014

Ms Gillian's PM 3's


So here we are in our last quarter of the school year!  It has been a super quick year and we have all had so much fun in the Forest room - true saying 'time flies when your having fun! :)'

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working on some exciting units - last week we were learning all about caterpillars and butterflies - looking at the butterflies life cycle - while talking about this we were lucky enough to watch the transformation of caterpillar to butterfly in our classroom the kiddos found this absolutely fascinating :)





We then enjoyed a trip outdoors to let them fly free.  The preschoolers waved them off as they flew away :)



This week we moved onto our plants and flower unit.  We worked on lots of fun art projects, planted some flower seeds, the kiddos used their magnifying glasses to look at different types of flowers...  The favorite this week was our 'flower shop' we set up in the sensory box they loved making wonderful, colorful arrangements of flowers in their little plant pots :)




As always we have been working on writing and recognizing our letters and numbers as well as our letter sounds.  I am so proud of how far our 3 year olds have come since the start of the year.



The kiddos all get on so well and have built up some great friendships throughout the year - one of my favorite times of the day is watching them play and listening to all their wonderful stories they share with each other :)





I'm sure these next few weeks are going to go just as fast as the past year has gone - I'm going to miss everyone of these wonderful kiddos,  but will be happy to see them grow and learn some more in Pre K. 

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to work with your fantastic children this year it has been an absolute pleasure :)