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!

The children have been very busy with their work! Some new activities out on the shelves this week:

Snowball Counters, which is a seasonal variation on our Numbers and Counters. To do this work the children put the mittens (which all have a numeral printed on them) on the mat in the correct order from 1-10. They then place the snowballs (cotton balls) under the corresponding mitten. For example the mitten with the "1" would have one snowball placed under it. The control of error is that there are 55 snowballs and if the child ends up with some left over or they do not have enough, then they know to go back and re-check their work.


Other seasonal variations on favorite activities include our winter lacing cards:


and our holiday tree at the cutting station. This has been a group effort over the last couple weeks with most everyone contributing to the decorating. This started as a basic, pencil outline of a tree and the children were provided with construction paper, scissors and glue and made a festive creation!



There has been a lot of interest in our math material lately. The Bank Game with the Golden Beads and the Golden Bead addition has been popular among our older students. For those who are not familiar (or need a refresher!) the Golden Beads are a great tool to introduce the children to the decimal system and understand unit quantities of ten, hundreds and thousands. A single bead equals one unit, ten beads strung on a wire indicates ten, one hundred is indicated by 10 bars side by side (which makes a square) and one thousand is ten one hundreds stacked on top of one another to make a cube. In our bank game the children go back and forth to the "bank" to exchange their quantities. For example if a child counts that they have 10 units, they may go to the bank to exchange them for 1 ten. If they count that they have 10 hundreds they may go to the bank to exchange them for a thousands cube. The Golden Beads and the small and large number cards allow the children to perform simple addition with really BIG numbers.





We've also been busy working with Mystery Words, making letter books, building words, doing puzzles and working with Sandpaper Letters.

During group time we've been talking and reading about different animals and which class they belong in. On Tuesday we made booklets about the life cycle of a frog and discussed that it belonged to the amphibian class and on Thursday we brainstormed a list of animals that are considered mammals. We hope to do more with animal classes after break as there seems to be a lot of interest in the subject.

We've been busy practicing for our Winter Celebration event! It will be held on Thursday, December 17th at 4pm at the Lancaster Congregational Church. The children are very excited to share the songs they have been working on.

And a few more happenings in the classroom:
(Yes, I went a little picture crazy this week)

Finally...Snow!

What a great first week in December!

We started talking about the different animal classes this week. We learned that there are six important animal classes: mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians and arthropods and we considered the different animals that belong to each class. We also learned about the parts of a fish and parts of a frog. Very interesting! We are excited to continue this in the coming weeks.

We were also very busy with stories about everyone's favorite subject: snow! We read about Snowflake Bentley who photographed snowflakes and enjoyed the story "Snow Sounds: An Onomatopoeic Story". The children had great fun making the "clank, crash, bang" sound of the plow, the "hush" sound of the snow and the "beep, beep, beep" of the school bus. We also enjoyed listening to our CD of the Polar Express.

During music we've been practicing our seasonal songs for our Winter Celebration event. On Wednesday and Thursday we were able to practice our songs with some live music! We had two special guests come in to play guitar and piano.

The children were also very busy with their work. Many children did the bank game and addition with Golden Bead material, worked with the Sandpaper Letters and Numerals, worked on building and writing words, sewed holiday buttons, used the winter/holiday lacing cards and made beautiful snowflakes with white paint against black paper.

Stone Soup

We had a nice couple days filled with Thanksgiving music, stories, projects and of course, Stone Soup! The children enjoyed cutting and washing their vegetables on Tuesday and finishing up their Thanksgiving turkey project. The children were very excited about Stone Soup on Wednesday morning, when they smelled it cooking. It turned out to be very delicious, although some children preferred eating the cheese, breads and crackers. It has been a great process this month reading through the different versions of the story, talking about sharing and community, preparing our vegetables and finally sharing Stone Soup together. Thanks to the volunteers who brought yummy food and helped serve and clean up.

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving!