Theme: On the Farm
Focus: Pigs, Sheep, and the entire farm life
Classical composer: Camille Saint-Saëns (You can hear the pronunciation on http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/saint+saens)
Table Activities: Self-portrait (we’ll save to compare with the end-of-year), farm coloring pages & mazes, wooden puzzles, pattern blocks, letter game (students used a fun sliding “cha-ching” machine to get two letters randomly and match them on an alphabet mat—so fun they didn’t even know they were learning!)
Music: Children created paper fish puppets (coloring and cutting then attached to a craft stick). With the puppets we practiced moving up and down the scale to Camille Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des Animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) song, “Aquarium” (see video and turn your volume up to hear a sample of the beautiful song). The children loved this activity! We are constrantly reviewing throughout the day our many musical concepts, including our terms forte, pianissimo, etc., as well as treble and bass clef. The kids are really getting it and it is exciting to see their progress. We also had some free-style fun with marching band instruments.
Activity Songs & Finger Plays: Our favorites from the past month, plus: “Where is Thumbkin?”, “Two Little Blackbirds”, “We are the Dinosaurs”, and “Old MacDonald”. We also have a song that uses the arms to make a line, circle, square and triangle.
Handwriting: We sing, “My teacher draws a letter for me, what’s this letter let’s look and see…” (Using the strokes, big line, little line, big curve, little curve, the teacher draws a letter and the kids guess it’s name and other associations, such as sound, who’s name starts with that letter, etc.), and lots of practice writing names or first letters. We are beginning to split the group into those who are working on uppercase and those who are ready for lowercase and more writing. Many of the lower-case letters start with a “magic c curve”. For lower case “e” we say “hit the baseball then run the bases”.
Art: Miss Cristina presented a fabulous lesson on lines and the terms “horizontal” (sleeping lines) “vertical” (awake lines). The children created line collages with various straight materials, such as craft sticks, straws, yarn, toothpicks, paper strips, and pipe cleaners. The children were so engaged and created some amazing art. We have some abstract artists in our midst!
Theme: What could be cuter than these students wearing pig snouts? We also had fun making sheep, and constructing tractors. We are working on skills such as cutting, gluing, coloring, following a pattern with specific directions & free form creating (both very important skills). It is fun to incorporate these learning skills into such creative and cute crafts. Also, we played a game that identified animals that live on the farm and animals that don’t. The children voted using red and green paddles. Finally, we played a game called, “When you hear the morning bell, you’re a ____…” where children get to be all kinds of fun farm animals.
Storybooks: Pigs by Gail Gibbons, Pigsty, Some Pig, Sheep in a Shop, Counting Ovejas, Farm Life, Can You Make a Piggy Giggle?, Old MacDonald’s Funny Farm. We also had reading loft time where the children discovered many farm themed books on their own.
Theme: What could be cuter than these students wearing pig snouts? We also had fun making sheep, and constructing tractors. We are working on skills such as cutting, gluing, coloring, following a pattern with specific directions & free form creating (both very important skills). It is fun to incorporate these learning skills into such creative and cute crafts. Also, we played a game that identified animals that live on the farm and animals that don’t. The children voted using red and green paddles. Finally, we played a game called, “When you hear the morning bell, you’re a ____…” where children get to be all kinds of fun farm animals.
Storybooks: Pigs by Gail Gibbons, Pigsty, Some Pig, Sheep in a Shop, Counting Ovejas, Farm Life, Can You Make a Piggy Giggle?, Old MacDonald’s Funny Farm. We also had reading loft time where the children discovered many farm themed books on their own.
Math: Small group work included: 1:1 correspondence and understanding number concepts: (Children rolled the large die and matched the number by making towers of cubes--very engaging), basic addition equations: (Children used the same dice, this time adding two numbers together. They used two cube towers to represent the two numbers and put them together to represent the sum & the teacher modeled the number equation on the board.)
Reading: This week we focused on reviewing the sounds and sight words already practiced this month. Now that we have assessed the students we will be working in our small groups on focused skills, individualizing our instruction to help the kids progress at their own pace.
Free-Play Fun: Lots of fun with the plastic farm animals, puzzles, fish pond, and reading loft.
Social Skills: As you have likely seen, we have provided each family with It’s a Great Day When We Follow the Rules! written and illustrated by Miss Cameron and Miss Tracy. We hope your child has lots of fun introducing you to our school rules and the silly parts of the story that make us all laugh. We are working on being very consistent with our rules so that we can all have a great day at school. We are using the time-out, naughty spot pretty liberally as a low-stress means of recognizing and reinforcing the rules. So far, we have noted tremendous improvements in class behavior as a result of our increased structure. You will hopefully hear this language over and over from your child, “It’s a great day when we follow the rules!!”
Here comes October!!
