“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” - Dr.Suess

Dear 3B Crew,

            It was an absolute pleasure having you as parents and our support system in the 3B class this year. Before we let you go for the summer, we want to tell you how much your children amazed us this year. The amount of growth they made is amazing and are very proud of each and every of them.  We will miss your children’s smiles, laughter, fun, happiness, and lastly amazing energy!

            We hope that they left the school knowing how important they are to us, to their friends, and to many others at Buckle My Shoe.  We know they will do many fabulous things in their life and we cannot wait to see what amazing gifts they will give to the world around us.

Love,

Ada and Adam

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Making a calendar important for the children!

Time concepts are very abstract for preschool children. They can’t see time, so it’s very difficult for them to understand it. To a young child, yesterday can mean last week, last month, or even last year. To them, yesterday simply means the past, as at this age children understand the concepts of “before” and “after.” This week 3B worked on their own calendar, the goal was not for the children to learn days of the week, but to help them handle the emotions related to the end of the year exciting events. Having a visual plan for the next two busy weeks will support the children’s need to have a predictable plan for the things that they are looking forward to. Working on the calendar involved some math as we marked days of the week and some letter sounding activities as we wrote down the days of the week but most importantly, now it will help us to understand when all the fun events will happen so they we feel emotionally satisfied.

Meet our Ms. Happy!!!

Big Mommy Dinosaur

This week we dove into giving our Mommy Dinosaur a bigger personality and uniqueness as we decided on the color that she will be and are very close to giving her a name! All of the activities that the children were involved in this week encouraged and supported our 3B friends in being teammates, listening to each other’s ideas and most importantly have fun together as a group.

Through method of voting, 3B friends were encouraged to use their math skills and in some cases addition and subtraction (as some friends changed their minds).

Now that the weather is nicer we will try to spend more time outside as the children truly enjoy it and so do we!

Once again we would like to wish you a great long weekend! We will see you on Tuesday!

Shhhh! We are working on a special project for some very special people...

This week our friends spent their time working on a very special project for you. This is the way to express their love and a way to cherish your day on May 12th (Mother’s Day) and June 16th (Father’s Day). Now throughout the next week we just need to care for them and hopefully these will blossom into something really beautiful.

Hard work pays off!

How are fossilized Imprints Formed?

Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, but they left behind many clues that we can use to learn more about them. They left behind fossilized bones, but they also left behind traces of their lives, including eggs and footprints! Footprint fossils are called imprint fossils, which means that something got squished into wet soil, mud, or sand and then turned into a fossil. We can track these ancient animals and learn more about them using these prints.

Thank you Zach again for your help! All of the children are very exited and proud to be part of this project!

Have a wonderful break!

I am special and so are you!

Each year, we acknowledge the importance of educating young children, our celebration is a week-long celebration focused on celebrations through fun,engaging and hand-on activities.

This national celebration, known as the Week of the Young Child, gives us an opportunity to learn, discover and laugh together. However, it is always the Special Person’s Day that children cherish the most. It is because of you and your presence that day, because that day you show your child that it is important to you what she/he does at school and that you want to be part of it. This gives the children the feeling of empowerment and a positive outlook on school. It is our hope that days like today help to build a community of unique individuals who will learn to soar, succeed and shine together!

Happy Birthday to Alisha, Oliver and Geneva! We love you!

All about T-Rex

Throughout this week we continued talking about our favorite dinosaur… Tyrannosaurus Rex. We began our own little investigation regarding the T-Rex… the big question was.. Why did T-Rexes have such short arms? That question was asked by one child but it sparked an interest among all of us. As we all sat down with this question in mind we gained insight into the children’s understanding and the theories that they had, or were able create. Independent thinking, and an ability to create their own theories, helps the children become critical thinkers and scientists at the same time.

Happy Birthday Romeo! We love you!

All about T-Rex...

Tyrannosaurus Rex is possibly the most well known dinosaur due to its huge size and ferocious nature. Thanks to a number of well preserved fossils, the T-Rex has been studied in detail by paleontologists and now by 3B Friends. This week began our own little investigation regarding the T-Rex and things we can discover about them. With a simple conversation about T-Rexes what they HAD, WERE, AND COULD DO we gained insight into the children’s knowledge and understanding of these dinosaurs. Going further, through child-directed activities such as storytelling on paper (illustrating and dictating) and dinosaur play in the mud we made, we learned even more about what 3B knows and thinks regarding T-Rexes. We will continue to explore the dinosaur in various ways going forward, and are especially excited about our upcoming trip to the T-Rex exhibit at The Museum of Natural History.

Happy Birthday Grady!


Reading Makes Us Feel Good!

Thank you so much to all of our Special Readers this week. The children (and teachers, too) were so happy to have you with us! The children have an inquisitive nature and the capability of absorbing knowledge that can come from being surrounded by books and being read to out loud so please remember that our classroom’s door is always open, so please continue coming in as our Special Readers.

Literacy week is an exciting, unique, and educational celebration held in our school. The aim of this week was to show the children that reading is fun and foster their love for literacy. In addition, we say, Thanks to you! We truly had diverse and a wonderful experiences this week. It was a powerful week during which the children were able to develop their understanding about literacy, books, and their magical power to enrich our imaginations! We spent a lot of time reading and sharing special moments together.

 

  Thank families for all your participation and the great gifts – books!

Why does a T-Rex have short hands?

For the past a couple of weeks we have been exploring dinosaurs. Multiple spontaneous conversations sparked interesting questions among the children about how fragile/how strong a dinosaurs’ egg can be. Can a mommy dinosaur crack the egg when sitting on it? Or, why does a T-Rex have short hands? Validating and supporting children’s natural interest is the key component of sustaining children’s curiosity and love for learning.

in addition, this week the children painted their dinosaurs made with their special grownups during our curriculum breakfast. As a continuation, 3B friends now are in the process of creating their own books with a story line about the dinosaurs and their adventures.

During our museum visit we explored dinosaurs’ fossils, bones and skeletons. For an hour, the children participated in hands-on guided explorations.

Happy 4th Birthday Alfie! We love you!

T-Rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus and more... Curriculum breakfast

We would like to say thank you for being coming today. Parents’ participation means a lot to children and shows that whatever they do at school is important to you. We already heard some friends telling others about their dinosaurs creations.

As we mentioned earlier today, we plan on working with these in the upcoming days. We plan on painting them and then developing verbal and written stories about them. Hopefully these activities will continue fostering the children’s interest, while providing us with further insight of children’s’ understanding about dinosaurs (and see if they still incorporate bridges and maps into the theme).


"I love playing with you."- Celebrating Friendships

Friendships are important to young children. Learning how to start and maintain a friendship is an important life skill. They provide not only companionship but also fun and support. As children read books on friendship, and as we talked about how to treat and appreciate friends, they start to recognize that it is good to have many friends to play with.

This week was all about appreciating each other and the little community that we have become.

Quotes of the week:

-Alisha to Geneva: “I love you.”

-Geneva to Romeo: “I like the way you sign in.”

Romeo to Oliver: “I love playing with you.”

Oliver to Grady: “I love your signing in.”

Grady to Cole: “I love when I am playing with you.”

Cole to Oliver: “I love you Oliver.”

Romeo to Alisha: “I like holding hands with you.”

Oliver to Geneva: “I love you Geneva.”





Teaching pre-k about composting

3B friends proudly share the responsibility of taking care of the compost bin and making sure that our worms get what they need to feel good in their new home. Each and every day we learn more and more about composting, today we were happy to share our knowledge with our friends from the pre-k room.

One of the things that we shared was how we make sure that worms have a slightly damp, but not too wet, environment. Alisha carefully demonstrated how to spray some water then passed the bottle to her friends so that everyone could have a turn spraying the bedding.

Also, we shared everything that we know about compost worms’ diet. The children mentioned that worms eat food that comes from nature and our classroom’s table. We explained that we try to save most of our plant-based food scraps and feed it to worms. 

Most importantly, pre-k friends were so interested that they would like to join us and save their food scraps to help take care of the worms and feed our compost. The best way to learn is through teaching others!


Dinosaurs need maps and bridges...

Throughout this week we continued exploring dinosaurs. As the children’s imaginations grew with each moving background, so did their stories. The children realized that now the dinosaurs need bridges to get from one place to another and this is where we are seeing science and building skills emerge. Soon enough some structural problems arose on how to balance their structures, how to make it sturdy enough for the big dinosaurs to cross over and how to prevent their bridge from falling. All of these situations require the children to use problem-solving as well as verbal skills.

Furthermore, as soon as the children applied the idea of a bridge taking us from one place to another, the idea of using maps came up. Some of the children started to draw maps as to help dinosaurs to get from point A to point B, some of the children had the idea of using a map to create a story about dinosaurs and other used it to reflect their understanding of how to move from one place to another.

It all started with dinosaur play and now our horizons have opened up to all of these new and exciting possibilities that children have brought up throughout this week.

Our worm compost is now a part of the 3B classroom...

Red wriggler worms are now our classroom pets! We are happy and very proud to be taking on this big responsibility yet great learning journey.

We are in the process of learning what kinds of table scraps and paper products they can eat in order to produce nutrient rich soil (worm poop). In addition to all of that happening at the up-close look we will learn about decomposition process along side.




"Dinosaurs used to live but not anymore." - Oliver

Dinosaurs have been popular in our room since the beginning of the year but as of a couple days ago some of the 3B children came into the classroom being dinosaurs, we knew right away that we should go deeper into that theme. We saw a passion and curiosity.  

We think that the study of dinosaurs fosters curiosity and a thirst for learning and questioning the world around us.  Children almost right away leaped into dramatic play time using props, creating verbal stories and asking scientific questions about these monstrous creatures i.e. meat eaters vs plant eaters, theories of extinction and volcanoes.  The study of dinosaurs incorporates a myriad of science and role playing activities and we can’t wait to see what is ahead of us. We will be learning along side the children.

Composting, composting, composting...

This week we started talking about composting. Composting is not only great for the environment, it is also an awesome science experiment that can help the children learn more about biology, life cycles, recycling and conservation.

It is a natural process of decomposition and recycling of organic material (such as leaves, grass, fruit and vegetable scraps) into a rich soil known as compost. It’s also important to teach children the basic principles of taking responsibility for the waste that we generate, which is done through recycling and composting. This makes composting a hands-on science experience!

We are looking forward to seeing how our science experiment evolves over the next few weeks and diving even deeper into the world of composting.

New Year... new experience...

Once again we just want to welcome back everyone! We are happy to see the children (and you) and we are looking forward to a great new semester full of laughter and great new experiences.

We began our week by giving our best while trying to sign in independently (without dots). The children were given an opportunity to sign in with dots or without them. Some of the 3B friends were ready to sign in independently, some were not and that’s okay. It is more important for the children to grow confidence in one task before moving on to the next one. Also, observing and exposing them to the new possibilities will slowly spark their interest in trying new tasks.

As we continue exposing 3B friends to the new experiences, we are now ready to being our classroom composting site. We will explore and learn how to take care of it together. We are scheduled to pick up our compost hotel on January 19th! We are excited and ready to take on this new journey all together.

Happy Holidays!

With love…

Lauren… we just want to say that you are a very special little girl! We love you and we will miss you. You are a wonderful friend and we can’t wait to see you again!

Love,

3B Friends


Our special recycled tree in spirit of the season....

As the holiday season is quickly approaching, the excitement in 3B is building. In the spirit of being together and surrounded by those that we care about we did many activities that touch upon the season. Our recycled Christmas tree is now ready, full of handmade ornaments and decorations. On the side, far from our camera’s flashes, the children have been busy working on gifts for their special grown-ups.

As the holiday season is the time of the year when we try to think about others, on Thursday we made special sandwiches for Santa and his wife as well as for everyone to enjoy during our holiday party.

It was very special for all of us to spend some time with Santa and his wife!

Today we celebrated PJ’s day with Ellen (Grady’s mom). While sipping on warm hot chocolate with hand full of marshmallows, we truly enjoyed listening to some great stories.