Fall 2014 -Now accepting applications.

This fall I'll be offering morning and afternoon classes for 3 and 4 year olds.  We will meet Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  The morning classes will be held 9:15-11:45 and afternoon classes will be held 12:30-3:00. As of today, I still have openings in both classes.  If you're interested please go to my registration page and download the form and return it to me.  Your place is held once I receive the form and $40 materials fee. Call Cindy at 713-8113  if you have any questions or would like to see the school.

February - A trip to the dentist

February's theme is friendship which ties in so well with Valentines Day, but it is also Dental Health Month so we took a field trip to visit Dr. Matthew Tuft.  It was AWESOME!

Our letters in February were T is for teeth (obviously).

    

Here the kids were making mouths with 20 baby teeth.

We also learned U is for umbrella and under.  (We had snack that day UNDER the table.)

V is for Valentines.

W is for Washington (We learned about George Washington and the REAL story about his teeth.  Hint they were NOT made of wood.)  We read the book "George Washington's Teeth" and made this cute art project.  They are getting so much more competent with cutting out their own pieces.

I found this cute idea at http://www.dltk-kids.com/usa/mcottonball-washington.htm

We also celebrated Groundhog Day in the very beginning of the month.  Here the kids are pretending to be groundhogs by crawling through our tunnels indoors.

Here's a cute song they learned about Groundhog day!

Using good books, music, art and movement help to solidify information and helps children to associate new ideas with previous ones.

January - Responsibility is the key

The theme for this month is Responsibility and here was our theme song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ2diAHg9a8   They love doing this little rap and the scenarios that the main character talks about really stick with them.  I've heard them months later say "Remember to do a good job on your work.  No scribble, scrabble (our word for hurried work)".

Our letters for January were N is for necklace, nickels, newspapers and numbers
                                           O is for owls  (Remember we covered P back in November)

                                           Q is for quilt, q-tips and queen

January was cold, snowy and icy so we couldn't go outside much, but the highlight of our month was making and eating real SNOW cones!

We also learned about Martin Luther King, Jr.  I told the children stories from my own life where I saw racial problems and how my family dealt with them.  We read the book "First Biography:  Martin Luther King, Jr."  When the kids heard how the people marched for equality they wanted to try it too.


We've been learning sight words since the second week of school and you can see they are beginning to spot those words and be able to write them.

Using movement, music, singing and role playing helps to cement new concepts.

December - A time for singing and celebrating

The theme for the month is love, so I put a lot of emphasis on how we treat each other.  I look for ways each day to "catch" them doing something kind or thoughtful for another class mate.  I encourage them to do nice things for their family members too and some of the best circle times are when they share what they did to help at home.

We stayed busy the whole month decorating our classroom for Christmas and making things to take home.

The kids really love to sing and there are so many fun Christmas songs to teach them.  We did "Jingle Bells" accompanied by wrist bands that had bells attached.  We sang "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer", "We wish you a Merry Christmas" and "Must be Santa".

Our letters for the month were L is for Love, M is for Music and S is for Santa.

We worked on math by making advent calendars and counting down the days to Christmas.

We also began learning about money.  In our sensory station the kids dug out coins and separated them into quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.  Some of the kids even began understanding and using number sentences.  

November - At time for gratitude

The theme was gratitude for the whole month and each week we focused on a few things that we were especially grateful for.
Week 1 - We are grateful for animals.  We were learning K is for Kangaroo so we made these cuties.

I got the idea from http://thestorytimelady.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/boing-boing-a-kangaroo-jumping-story/    There is a cute story that goes with it and the kids loved acting it out on our puppet stage.  We started out gratitude book which we added to throughout the month.  The kids chose their favorite animals to put on a collage page about animals.  They also learned about animal biomes.  We read "Grover's Book of Cute Baby Animals".  We learned the song "Please and thank you, please and thank you, It's what we say, It's what we say, We are very thankful, We are very thankful, Everyday, everyday".  It's sung to the tune of Frere Jacques.  We played animal games online from Sheppardsoftware.com

Week 2 - We are grateful for family and friends.  Our letter of the week is I is for Igloo.  We talked about being grateful for our homes.

We added three pages to our grateful book this week because we also spoke about the freedoms of our country since the following Monday was Veteran's day.  

Week 3 - We are grateful for food.  Our letter of the week is P is for Pilgrim.  We read "This is the Feast", "The Very First Thanksgiving Feast" and "Who will carve the turkey".  We sang a song about a turkey to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle.  The words are "Turkey, turkey look at you, please be careful what you do, Thanksgiving day will soon be here, We eat turkey every year, Go and hide out in the woods, We'll eat pizza like we should."  We literally counted our blessings and other Thanksgiving objects.

And even though we sang about eating pizza we had a traditional Thanksgiving feast.

October - A time for imagination and creativity

  As the weather cooled and fall set in, it was the perfect setting for celebrating Halloween and visiting the local pumpkin patch.  We went to The Farmstead in Meridian near the end of the month.  It was our first field trip and the kids did beautifully.  I'm lucky that so many parents wanted to come along that day too.  See some of the pictures below:

 This is both the morning and afternoon classes combined.

 Just chillin on the hay wagon after picking pumpkins.

 Riding the cow train and playing in the old west town.

 They made it through the straw maze as a team!

In addition to the field trip we were getting ready for Halloween.  We played Dress UP!

And put on puppet shows!

We made some spooky ghosts!

And some spooky treats to eat.  Our spiders were made with Ritz crackers, peanut butter to hold them together, pretzel sticks and jelly beans for eyes.

Our jack-o-lantern masks were made with flour tortillas, butter and cinnamon sugar and then broiled.

Even with all this fun we learned 5 new letters!

E is for Elephant.  

F is for Fall. We painted beautiful fall leaves, jumped in real ones and went on a nature walk to see signs of the season.  We read the book "Harold's Purple Crayon" and talked about imagination.

G is for Ghost and goats.  We read the book "The Three Billy Goats Gruff".  We "discovered" hidden letter G's when we used magic paint to uncover them.

H is for Halloween.  We made our own shape monsters this week, read the book "Quick as a Cricket" by Don and Audrey Wood and learned to sing one of their favorite songs of the year.  The words are "I'm a mean old witch with a hat, and I ride on my broomstick with my cat and my face is wrinkled and my hands are too and you better watch out or I might scare youuuuuuuuuuuuu"

J is for Jack-o-lantern.  We read "The Little Old Lady Who wasn't afraid of anything", "The Dot" (another book about seeing things in a new way) and "Pumpkin Eye".  We had a Halloween party and added some new sight words to our vocabulary.  I try to have the kids see sight words in as many ways as possible.  Here they are "getting the feel" of the word by using play dough to cover a laminated card with some of our sight words.

It was a full month of discovery, learning and fun!