Week nine 2008

Happy Halloween! Here are highlights from week nine! Theme: Autumn/Halloween Focus: Spiders, Bats and all things creepy! Classical composer: Igor Stravinsky, Russian 1882-1971 Here is a link to an amazing video of Stravinsky conducting the finale of his Firebird Suite. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTep91oqgVk&feature=related The children really enjoyed Firebird, especially when the firebird comes out. We used the performance on the Fantasia 2000 CD, which covers a delightful amount of story and suspense with a broad range of emotions. It was delightful to watch the student’s faces as their imaginations engaged in the music. This was a big hit! Table Activities: Letter matching BINGO (Students have the uppercase letters on their board and we show them the lowercase letters. They find the matching letter and mark it.), autumn-themed coloring pages, dot-to-dots, mazes, and hidden pictures. Music: The children had fun listening and moving to Stravinsky. Also, continual reinforcement of the songs and terms are helping the children understand and remember remarkably well. Songs and Finger Plays: “Itsy, Bitsy Spider”, “Spiders Love to Party”, “Hunting for Dracula” and favorites from weeks past. Art: Miss Cristina introduced the children to the concept of perspective using fall leaves, pumpkins, bats, craft stick gates, and moons. They used a ruler to draw the horizon line and placed the appropriate things in the sky or on the ground, in front of the gate or behind it, etc. You can see by the pictures how the children used these ideas to create their own special Halloween picture. There were no mistakes here…the pumpkins in the sky are flying pumpkins and some of the bats wanted to eat pumpkins on the ground! Very imaginative! Handwriting and Reading: We added the /t/ sound to our sound train. With one group, we reinforced the 5 sounds introduced thus far: /m/, /s/, short /a/, long /e/, and /t/ and practiced matching the beginning sounds to common pictures, including three of our school friends. The other group used those five sounds and a few more to work with the –at word family. We matched –at words with their pictures, emphasizing the beginning sound and the rhyming ending. These papers can be kept and practiced at home to reinforce the skills. We practiced making Play-doh snakes and using them to make uppercase letters and numbers. Play-doh is a great hand-strengthener and coordination-builder. We need lots of practice to make snakes and balls…it’s a learned skill! Using the snakes to make the letters following correct stroke order is another great way to practice the alphabet and numbers. Theme: Halloween is a favorite topic for kids and we spent time talking about some of the creatures that are common throughout this time of year. We learned some things about spiders (most spiders have 8 eyes) and about bats (bats can “see” at night using their super-duper sonar hearing - echolocation). We made a cool spider web by wrapping yarn around craft sticks and attaching our creepy, crawly friend to the end. We made Halloween pictures with Miss Cristina working on perspective. We also played Halloween BINGO with some spooky pictures. The winner (which was everyone) got some chattering teeth to take home. Storybooks: Diary of a Spider; Yellow Bird, Black Spider; Itsy, Bitsy Spider; We’re Off to Find the Witch’s House (“Which house?); Stellaluna; Inside a House That is Haunted; The Spooky Old Tree, Three Little Ghosties, Cocka-Doodle Whooooooooo! "Do they dare go into that spooky old tree?" Math: Every day we are reinforcing counting skills by counting the days on our calendar. We also practice counting numbers on the number line. Most days we practice counting by 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s. (So far up to 20). The progress in calendar skills is really exciting. The students repeat the date and sometimes ask to do it all on their own as we point and sometimes give a bit of assistance. (“Today is: Thursday, October 30th, 2008”) It is fun to see their excitement as they say it all on their own. We also practice the days of the week. One song you can practice at home is: (To the tune of the “Eensy, Weensy Spider”) Sunday, Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Then comes Saturday. Start all over again! Sunday, Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Then comes Saturday. Those are the days of the week! Free-Play Fun: One big hit this week was our creepy, crawly flingers. The kids had so much fun free-playing with the flingers and trying to hit a target. Have a spooky and safe Halloween! We will see you in November…