This week Magda visited with a special lesson about bread. The children learned how bread is made and what ingredients are included. We learned that yeast feeds on sugar and releases carbon dioxide so the bread will rise.
Then we helped perform two experiments with yeast! The first one included putting warm water, sugar and yeast in a bottle with a balloon pulled over the bottle opening. As the yeast began to eat the sugar and release gas, the balloon slowly began to inflate.
We are still in the middle of observing of our second experiment with yeast. We made a bread mixture in a glass jar and the children were able to observe it slowly begin to rise and see the bubbles the yeast was creating. We are eager to see how much it has risen over the weekend!

We talked and read about reptiles this week complete with some dinosaur math and multiple request for the 'Dinosaur Stomp' book and song. We also enjoyed a new music activity that included playing instruments along with "The Empty Pot" book. What a great week!

"Believe In Books" was back this week with Clifford the big, red dog! The children were delighted with the Clifford stories that were shared and the Clifford books they were given. Clifford received lots of hugs and high fives.

We talked about some characteristic of mammals this week. We learned that all mammals have hair or fur at some point during their life, that female mammals produce milk for their babies and that all mammals are warm blooded. Interesting stuff!

On Thursday we read a book on Martin Luther King, Jr. which was written very nicely for young children. It talked about the idea of love, peace and acceptance and sparked a good conversation about being kind and fair to others.

During music we listened to an audio book about jazz and played some rhythm games.

Beyond that, we have been busy with our work!

Happy New Year!

We are continuing with our study of the animal classes. We are reading through a series of “Guess Who” books about animals. The books give hints about an animal on each page, and once the children have all the information, they try and guess the animal. We’ve read about snakes, owls, bats, sharks and more. We’ve also read “Stella Luna” a book about a fruit bat who learns about friendship, family and acceptance and enjoyed listening and moving to a song about goldfish.

Lots of exciting and important work has been happening in the classroom. Our youngest children have been busy pouring, scooping, stringing beads, working with the Red Rods and practicing sounds with the Sandpaper Letters. Many older students practiced their numbers 11-19 with the Ten Board and some did the Short Chains and the Addition/Subtraction Boards. Others traced, colored and labeled their own continent maps, learned the parts of the frog and fish by tracing our nomenclature cards and many made “oo”, “a” and “i” books. It was a busy week!