Monday, September 30, 2013

Letter of the Week

Hi Parents,
We just wanted to give you a quick overview and get everyone on the same page as we start a "new" school year. If you have not already done so, please be sure to pick up an October calendar that is in your parent pocket on the door of our classroom. For those of you that have already seen it you probably noticed that our letter of the week starts with "B" instead of "A" and it is completely out of the traditional alphabetical order. This is intentional. The letter "A" is a very complex vowel with a couple of different sounds. Many early childhood education experts suggest teaching consonants that have single simple sounds first, reserving vowels and complex consonants for later. Also we chose to start with some letters for which the capital and lower cases look the same, such as as in "S" and "s" and "P" and "p." It is also better for the children if we can relate the letter to what we are learning in class, allowing them to see the letter written on many things and hear the sound of the letter when we are talking and brain storming in class. This week for example, Blue Room is working on transportation, so we will talking about "b"oats, hot air "b"alloons, and "b"uses. In Purple Room, they have been interested in "b"ugs, like "b"utterflies and "b"eetles. We will be setting up our "B"irthday "B"oard as well. The "P"umpkin "P"atch is also coming up the following week, so there will be a lot of talk about "p"umpkins.



My goal is to prepare a monthly newsletter and calendar so that parents will be kept up to speed on what's coming next. We are striving to keep both the Blue Room and Purple Room on the same page, so that all the teachers can collaborate to make the school a great place to learn. Please know that a lot of thought and time go into what we decide to teach and do with your children everyday, and it all is directed by the children's interests.
We are very excited and blessed to have the teaching staff that we do, and are so grateful to have such amazingly supportive parents. Above all, we consider ourselves lucky to share our days with your awesome children, who come to school every day excited to learn and explore.
Thanks again parents!
Teacher Rashida & Teacher Kristina

Friday, September 27, 2013

Bugs and Reading corner

Hello parents,

Bugs still have a strong hold in our classroom, be it spiders, beattles or crickets. Feel free to come and get a tour of the science area with your child.


We are making a web with yarn..don't get caught!





Lacing bug shapes is so great for our eye-hand coordination along with developing spatial relationships.



Painting lady bugs is great with our color recognition and developing fine motor skill and painting black dots on red is great for our brush control. It also opened up conversations about bugs' markings and how we can represent real bugs in our art.





I know D. wanted to learn how to write the word butterfly:) Teacher Rashida helped him spell it first with the letter magnets so he would have the model to copy onto his paper. It is great when emergent curriculum combines art and literacy!






Playing Jenga with googley eye caterpillars..

This week we also worked on the front covers of our journals.











Working on patterns. Teachers gave some coaching, but the children built these patterns for themselves!

Readers' Club..come and join us with a book.





Readers' Club has been a big hit. We pick our favorite book and read in our special corner and feel all grown up...

We are writing letters to our friends and parents..watch out for the incoming mail!






Enjoy your weekend.
Richa.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Bugs and Transportation....

Hello Purple Room,

Our kids have had varied interests this week, including transportation, bugs, and music.

It started with making roads...











It was lot of trial and error and hard work. It turns out that whole wheat flour makes good bread but terrible playdough, so we had to try again with plain flour. Still, play dough roads are not sturdy, so the next day we had to add sand and glue, it also worked better for the signs to stay erect!













We are still working on cardboard cut out school buses. We still have lot of work to do for that. Hopefully we will have finished products to share next week. Imagine a school bus manufacturing plant moving to San Jose :)

James Green, a local artist came to do a Drumming and Drawing class on Tuesday.


















Bugs, spiders, beetles and ants (yes, live ones) now grace our light table. We are talking about feeding them, taking care of them, and eventually letting them go back to their natural habitats.








On the other yard, we decorated the tree branches with our pine cones..










We've had a great week and look forward to continuing on Monday. Enjoy your weekend!

Friday, September 13, 2013

Babies!!

Hello Purple Room Parents,
I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.
This week, we will begin discussing the alphabet and review the letters of the alphabet (upper case and lower case) as well as their sounds. As the school year goes on, you will see letters and other basic skills rolled into the play-based activities every day.
Secondly, many of our students have been asking Teacher Cecilia questions about her baby. So, this week we will also be discussing babies. We will talk about what babies need as well as practicing appropriate ways to care for babies. We will practice holding, changing, and dressing babies. For sharing this week, I would like each child to bring a picture of themselves as a baby. We will be comparing us now to us in our pictures. We will talk about the similarities and differences.
Lastly, a friendly reminder that Thursday is Cecilia's last day and Friday will be my last day. We are continuing to talk about it with our students and I encourage you to do the same at home. It important that we discuss our feelings during this time of change.
I am looking forward to a great week.
Warm regards,
9/5/13

Welcome Teacher Aimee, Rashida, Thaovy and Maria..

Purple Room has a new team, with a mixture of some new staff and some existing staff. Thanks a lot to all of the teachers for running the classroom without skipping a beat. We do miss Teacher Shania, however Purple Room has their schedule, centers and everyday routine running as usual.
Some of the highlights of this week were...
General interest in natural materials and their integration with art:








Leaf prints, textures, and pine cones were touched, smelled, painted on, and discussed.
Transportation has come up as a interest and may become a long term project. Discussions have centered around wheels and how cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, and even wheel barrows carry things around. Along with that, they discussed that cows and horses are also a means of transportation in some places. These emerging topics have taken kids to making airplanes and boats with paper, exploring sink and float concepts at the science station, making their own roads.
















Wheels have been integrated with this theme by matching of upper case and lower case letters. This is a great example of literacy tied with children's emerging interests.
Painting boats with foamy shaving cream has its own benefit. Holding a fat brush and painting with runny paint works magic for our eye hand coordination, and provides a different sensory experience from ordinary paint.




Talking about airplanes also led to a discussion of space shuttles and astronauts. Te children are continuing to dress up as astronauts and other professions.
Sports is also a theme that has our kids in both preschool rooms enthralled. Coach Zack's visit with his soccer and baseball drills was of great interest on Tuesday.
























Our interest in babies is still there...Evan's baby brother visited them couple of days ago and everyone wanted to get him blankets, milk bottles, etc. It's always great for our kids to learn about nurturing and taking care of others.
Hammering and marble run were ideas from Blue Room that made it to Purple Room....yay for kids and teachers collaborating!
















This has been a week full of learning, fun and welcoming new friends. We're off to a great start together!

Thanks for your support during this time.
Richa.