Hello, Bluebird Families!
This week we continued our study of apples. We read books together like, Our Day at the Apple Orchard, An Apple Tree Through the Year, Johnny Appleseed, and How does an Apple Grow? We made our own apples out of paper bags by painting them, stuffing them with crumpled paper, and adding real sticks as stems. We collected these sticks on an adventure walk, which was declared “the best adventure ever!” (Don’t worry! We just walked around our school together outside of the playground fence.) We also created collages of an apple tree during all four seasons. Your children really enjoyed cutting and gluing brown construction paper to form the trunks and branches, as well as choosing various materials and placing them on their trees as the snow, blossoms, leaves, and apples! Each collage was truly a unique masterpiece!
We extended our study of time to include telling time to the hour on a digital clock. I had previously focused on using an analog clock, but in a discussion of wake up times and bedtimes, some children explained that they didn’t know what time they went to bed or woke up, because they couldn’t read their alarm clock. When I showed them a list of all of the digital “O’Clocks” and how to read them, they quickly understood! We also read The Grouchy Ladybug, which involves a lot of telling time. On every page, I read a time in the story and the children took turns moving the hands on an analog clock into the correct position and writing the digital time on the white board. They really enjoyed being in charge of time!
We also explored several math concepts with unifix cubes, like counting, creating patterns, and measuring. We measured many items in our classroom with unifix cubes. It was fun to stack cubes and compare which things were tallest or longest or widest or shortest. We posted the results on our bulletin board outside of our classroom, so you can check them out!
On Thursday, the Honeybee class gave us a monarch caterpillar and chrysalis. The children loved watching the catepillar munch away on the milkweed. They were so amazed by how much it ate! Of course, we had to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar! On Friday, the chrysalis was turning darker and we could see wings through it! We knew it would come out soon! As reported by Sally, it emerged on Saturday and was released. That munching caterpillar is now in its own chrysalis, which we will be watching closely!
