Hello Families!
Happy October to you! I hope you've all been having a great long weekend and happy holiday if you celebrate. We only have a three day week and here is the news...
FRIDAY FAMILY SING AND FIELD TRIP:
FAMILY SING - will start at 8:35 and will probably run to 9:00. This is a time for us all to sing together - your kids, you, any siblings, other family members. Please join us if you can! There will be song books and familiar songs. If you can't stay - please don't worry about your child not having a grown up - the grown ups who can stay will snuggle in with your child too. We have FAMILY SING every first Friday of the month.
After Family Sing and making sure we all go to the bathroom, our FIELD TRIP will be walking to 93rd Street in Central Park. We will first position ourselves under some trees and will be creating "Bark Rubbings" - artworks using paper, crayon and the bark of the tree. We will also collect some leaves, acorns and small twigs for future science and art lessons.
After the tree portion of our field trip we will go play in the Wild West Playground. We will stay there until about 11:15 and then go back to school for lunch. There will be no water play at the playground - just all the other fun stuff.
PLEASE JOIN US on our walking field trip! You would be with us from 9:20 - 11:15. On every trip we take the more adults the better! I will put up a sign up sheet outside the classroom. Thank you!
WATER BOTTLES: Please be sure to send your child to school with an empty water bottle or even a plastic cup they can use to drink from our water dispenser. We are trying not to use plastic throw away cups. Thank you!
NO SCHOOL: On Wednesday, Oct. 9th for Yom Kippur.
WHAT WE ARE UP TO:
We are still working through everybody's Star Name as part of our word study/social studies work. This week we will introduce vowels within the context of looking at and learning names.
In writing we are going to learn that sometimes writers close their eyes, picture the topic they want to write about and then put all the details into their pictures and possibly words. We are also continuing to learn to use the alphabet chart on the back of our writing folders as a tool to help us write down sounds we hear when trying to write words. But the most difficult part of writers workshop right now is the building of writing stamina. In our workshop we write until the whole amount of writing time is over. We teach the saying, "When you are done, you have just begun." - which has kids fighting against the instinct to immediately get up to show their writing to me and be finished with writing. We are going to be working on figuring out what "done" means - is there anything else you can add? Details in a picture? A label? A sound? And then once a child decides they are truly finished with a piece they need to place it in their folder, grab onto a new idea and get a new piece of paper - independently. So sophisticated!
In reading we are getting used to reading with a partner. The kids have learned how to sit "hip to hip," holding a book in the middle and taking turns doing "see saw reading" which is I read a page, you read a page. This week we will be focusing on re-reading. When we re-read a book we begin to pick up and understand new things about it. One thing we begin to see is that all of the pages of a book go together and then when we "read" the pages (and by read we mean both reading pictures and, if children are already reading some words, then reading words but both are reading), we put the pages together and use our own words to learn as much as we can.
In math we are going to be focusing on how to organize our counting. How can we make sure we count a group of objects correctly? We will revisit the game "Shake and Spill 6" again and also learn about representing our math thinking.
We will be learning about trees so we are ready for our trip on Friday. We will see what we already know about trees and then focus on the parts and their purposes.
We have almost finished our "Me Stew" projects and will continue our social studies work of looking closely at our differences and similarities. We will also continue to learn about compromise when, for example, we are building in the block area, doing dramatic play, creating sculptures with playdoh, sharing art materials, building with construction materials. How do we manage to work out who uses a tool first? How do we figure out what to build together when we both may have our own individual ideas? How do we manage taking turns? Here is one of my favorite quotes about this type of social learning, "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood." Mr. Rogers.
Have a wonderful rest of the week!
Love,
Lynn