Three more days of school! Can you believe it?

The students have been very creative the past few weeks drawing, painting and making their own little booklets. This week we made props to go along with our spring pantomime that they hope to perform for families at the picnic on Thursday. The pantomime is a great movement excercise that also ties in with all the exciting things we observe in the spring: seeds sprouting, breezes, warm sunshine, gentle rain and of course butterflies.

Speaking of butterflies... we really enjoyed watching our fat caterpillars form a chrysalis and then hatch to become Painted Lady butterflies. There was much excitement when they finally hatched from their chrysalis and we were able to release them.

We are perfecting our folk dances and have finished making some beautiful posters to go along with them:






With the weather being so nice we've been trying to do some lessons outside. On Friday the students learned about the parts of the tree and made tree puppets out of brown bags. We then used our puppets to sing "The Green Grass Grows All Around." We also determined how many friends we needed to complete a circle around the tree.





Other pictures from the week:



School picnic is Thursday, June 10th at noon. See you then!

We had a busy week working on our end of the year art project. The children are creating self-portrait collages and they are turning out great.

We've also been practicing our folk dances and a spring pantomime to share with our families at the end of the year picnic. On Friday, our students began making posters for each of our folk dances to show the countries the dances originate from. We have beautiful France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and United States posters in the works. They used the geography maps to punch out the country shape, colored flags and added illustrations to show more about each dance.

We've also been acting out "The Grouchy Lady Bug" story. The children enjoy taking turns pretending to be the different animals. It was a highly requested activity this week and I think we all have the story memorized by now.

We have added a tray with cards to the play dough activity, that has everyone's name and the children are able to select their name or a friends name to make out of play dough. It's been a fun and popular activity.



Other pictures from this week:

Multiplication Board





Journal Writing



Stringing Beads


Enjoying the sunshine!



Sleds have many uses at Sunnybrook :)


Dandelions!


***Show and Tell: Wednesday, May 26th

This week we began our last unit on plants. We sang about being little seeds that are about to sprout and enjoyed many wonderful books on gardens, flowers and seeds. We revisited a favorite music activity with reading, "The Empty Pot" and using musical instruments to help narrate the story.

We enjoyed making pots from newspaper and planting our own sunflower seeds to bring home for Mother's Day! The children also enjoyed making butterfly hand prints.



Our caterpillars keep growing longer and fatter. They seem to be getting very sleepy...



Other happenings in the classroom:


Spindle Boxes


Short Chains


Bank Game


Ten Board

It was a great week filled with lots of art projects, reading, math materials, singing and dancing!

Happy May!

Stone Pizza pictures:

The preparation...





Ready for the oven!


Mmmm...pizza!



Thank you to everyone for contributing your favorite pizza topping. The children had a great time washing, cutting, shredding and preparing the pizza together.

Over April vacation I took my girls to Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory & Gardens in Deerfield, MA (which I highly recommend if you are ever in the area) and was able to bring back a Painted Lady butterfly kit so we can watch the butterfly life cycle. We have 5 caterpillars that we are observing. The observation at the end of the week was that they were definitely "fatter." Hopefully we can observe the transformation to butterflies by the end of the school year.




With caterpillars on the brain we enjoyed the "Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle and talked about the collage art technique that is used in many of our favorite Eric Carle books. We experimented with some collage art of our own:



Our Folk Dances are coming along nicely and we hope to be able to share them with you before the end of the school year. It was a great Sunnybrook week!

(Our "Sandpiper Dance")

We had a great week singing, practicing some new folk dances and learning more about food. On Tuesday we enjoyed a story called, "Stone Pizza" which was similar to Stone Soup, except it features a coyote and other desert animals. We had a discussion about the differences and similarities in the Stone Soup story and the Stone Pizza story. We thought about our favorite pizza toppings and created our own paper plate pizzas. After vacation we ask that everyone bring in their favorite non-meat pizza topping, so we can work together and make our own Stone Pizza. It will be an fun (and yummy) way to end our food unit.




During circle on Thursday we made our own food pyramid out of cardboard boxes. We then took turns sorting pictures of food into the pyramid. Some of our friends then enjoyed making a food collage with the pictures.

As always, we have been busy with our work! Some things we have been working on...

The Stamp Game is used for static (no exchanging or carrying) addition. It is more abstract than using the bead material for addition but the child is still manipulating the material to reinforce the concrete addition process.



The Multiplication Board introduces the child to the concept of multiplication in a hands on way.



Working on fine motor skills by scooping beans.


Geography puzzle work.



Butterfly tracing!