What would you like to receive for the holidays?
Grayson: A train
Sloane: I want a green doll.
Belle: I want- Belle want baseball! I want a bunny. I want baby tiger.
Luca: Baseball
Finn: A remote control dump truck and a remote control excavator.
Roger: Excavator present. I want a baseball too.
Eloise: A ball.
Manuela: Dress!
John: I want a tiger, a baby tiger.
Kenny: A baby doll, a baby girl.
(We will ask Riley on Monday what she’s hoping for). And now that we know what everyone wants, we are going to start our conversation about giving. Each child is going to draw another child’s name and make something for them! We can’t wait to see the precious objects that they make for each other next week.
Other ways to give: we have been talking about bringing in food to share with people who do not have enough food at home. There’s a big box at the front of the school full of different cans and boxed food to share - we’d love to have the kids be able to drop off some items in the box on their own!
We will also be making cards next week that we will send to a children’s hospital to make their holidays a little brighter, and share our joy and creativity.
Paint
This week we continued to work diligently with paint. We explored a lot of different textures that were new to us: we painted onto dried salt, used paint mixed with shaving cream that dried really fluffy, used a paint made with oatmeal, used a paint thickened with flour, and a paint thickened with glitter. Hopefully we can use these thicker paints to create some really interesting compositions going forward.
We added our pictures onto our paint jars, and we will work on filling them up with some more paint next week before we start using them.
Our salt and watercolor snowflakes are hanging from a branch in our classroom
Our texture trees are going to be featured in the holiday inspired window before entering the school
Emotions
Thank you to those who have sent us some images of your child’s emotions- we’d love pictures of adults making these expressions, as well as siblings to add some depth to the book that we are creating. Thanks so much for your help, we appreciate it!
We have been hearing so many wonderful forms of self expression this week! Friends are really starting to be able to tell each other exactly what they are thinking and how they are feeling. Now that they are establishing these patterns of communication with one another, we are seeing friendships form and a great deal more cooperative play happening! It’s amazing what a little bit of language can do. Children are able to say things like, “It’s my turn,” “Can I have a turn?” and “That made me feel mad/sad/happy.” Way to go, 2A! This is a big step.
Reading
The books we really loved reading this week included:
Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy by Don Freeman
The Magical Snowman by Catherine Walters
Ten Gingerbread Men by Ruth Galloway
Little Blue Truck’s Christmas by Alice Schertle
Pete the Cat Saves Christmas by James Dean
Llama Llama Holiday Drama by Anna Dewdney
Specialists
On Tuesday we used the oranges that you brought in and poked cloves in to create pomanders with Diane. If you’re wondering what to do with it: leave it in the bag in a cool dry corner and wait two weeks. It should harden and become a perfect, deliciously scented ornament.
For Spanish this week, we continued to learn the concepts of pequeno (little) and grande (big); ¿Qué tiempo hace hoy? – How is the weather today?;
On Wednesday we worked with Coach Jojo and honed our soccer skills
On Thursday we enjoyed music time with Emily
For cooking this week we combined applesauce, cinnamon and glitter to create dough for ornaments (which we rolled out and cut this morning)
We are looking for more recycled materials:
Carpet samples
Tiles
Old keys
Bottle caps and lids of all kinds
Shoe boxes
Ribbons
Tubes