It was a short week after the teacher workday on Monday. Did your children tell you about some of the changes we made in our room? We have an office to “work” in with writing tools, an old school rotary phone, an abacus, and a keyboard. We also have some new play baskets with familiar stories and puppets and toys that help us play out the story. We read the story of Stellaluna and talked about bats versus birds, the different kinds of bats, and what bats eat.
We added some pumpkins to our playspace this week and will continue to read about pumpkins, make art with pumpkins, carve our own pumpkin, count our pumpkin seeds, and plant some seeds. We loved hammering golf tees into our pumpkin this week.
On Wednesday we had our first rainy day of the school year. Not going outside changed our perception of time in both the morning and the afternoon. We’ll go outside if it is wet and misty, but not if it is pouring. Please think about always having rain boots available for your child, as well as a jacket.
Onyx’s family donated an old canoe, and we are going to install it safely on the playground for daily floats. A few families said that they have paddles that we can use as well. Our whole class can fit in the canoe at once, so it’ll be a great place for stories. Our maiden voyage was really exciting, and we’ll get it installed permanently next week.
Our book today was The Secret of the Apple Tree, and the whole class was inthralled with the way the book asks questions and then reveals the answer when I shined a flashlight through the back of the page. We’ll read another Shine-A-Light book when we study the human body.
Does anyone have a wonderful acorn tree? I’d love to have some to use as loose parts in our play kitchen and as counters in a math center. We are also going to talk about trees in the coming weeks, and I thought we should grow some. If you have any 4-6 inch pots I’m looking for about 16. We might need to grow a small forest in our windows.
