It's hard to believe that we've already been in school for three weeks! The children are settling in nicely, and it's been sweet to see new friendships and interests develop. One of the favorite activities is in the Practical Life area: rock painting! This is done with water, two medium-sized rocks and various sized paint brushes. The purpose is to develop concentration and fine motor skills. The children get joy out of making the rock "beautiful" when it is shiny with water and can experiment with different sized brushes to see the brush strokes.


Other activities this week included: finishing nature collages, making "apples"
with cinnamon scented play dough, collecting leaves for our leaf books, reading Autumn stories and singing new and favorite songs from our "Rise Up Singing" book.

Working with the Color Tablets
The purpose of the Color Tablets is to assist the child in identifying color and to visually discriminate different shades of color. There are three different color boxes and the third box (below) is also a language lesson in understanding the concepts of "dark", "lighter", and "lightest".


Short Chains
The Short Chains are practice for linear and skip counting to 100. The Short Chains represent the squares of the number 1-10.


Drumming!



Matching lower and upper case letters


Working with the Sandpaper Letters


Pouring exercise

"Rain, Rain, Go Away" was our motto last week. It seemed that every time we tried to go out to play we got rained on! Although, the children were quite eager to get out the rainy day activities. Hopefully everyone got a chance to enjoy the sunny weekend!

Despite the gloomy weather, the classroom was a busy, happy place all week. Along with lots of exciting math, language and practical life work, we had fun apple stamping with fall colors, moving like fish and birds with our Carnival of Animals CD (and movement scarves, of course), doing nature collages and performing puppet shows.

Working on numbers 11-19 with the Teen Board.

Apple Stamping and other art projects

Fun during Music/Movement time



Puppet Theater



Window Washing (Practical Life activity)



Investigating Shells



Working with Movable Alphabet to build words

First Week of School!

Hello Sunnybrook families and friends,

I hope our new and returning families enjoy this blog. It will be updated weekly and will give you a peek into the happenings of the classroom.

We had a great first week of school. The returning children were excited to get to work and our new students have done a great job of exploring the classroom, meeting new friends and beginning to work with the materials.

We started the week by reading, "The Kissing Hand," which is a great story for the first day of school, and introduced our calender. We practice the months, days of the week and record the weather during morning circle. During music we did rhythm games, played our rhythm sticks, maracas and triangles along to "Play your Instruments" by Ella Jenkins, enjoyed "The Bear Hunt" CD/story and the movement activity to "We all Go Traveling By".

On Thursday we read "Mouse Paint" and did a color mixing activity at circle. Our Friday students enjoyed mixing paint and painting their own white mouses. Our Friday students also worked on leaf collection and identification for the Leaf Books they will be working on over the next few weeks. We also collected extra leaves and pressed them to use for a project with the whole class in the coming weeks.

All the children enjoyed the new rakes outside and building with the wood pieces donated by Garland Mill (thank you)! All in all, it was a great first week back!

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!