Hi JK parents!

What a fun week learning about life on the farm!  We have watched instructional videos about milking dairy cows and simulated this using rubber gloves filled with diluted white paint.  The children were amazed at how much time is required to milk a cow for even enough milk to have with their cereal.  It definitely puts into perspective appreciating animals for their products we receive from them!  (And we won't even talk yet about the poor honey bee and how they work their entire lives to produce 1/10 of a teaspoon of honey.)

Dr. Glader has been visiting our classroom each Friday and reading the children a story as she gets to know the JK students!  They love her visits.  She's another resource to support our social and emotional learning. 

Our Pajama party was simply awesome!  We made pumpkin muffins and decorated them, and even delivered some to the chef and assistant chefs and sang them our October song!  We also watched the video of the book, "Room on the Broom" and had popcorn.  Thanks to Kadence's mom for bringing her air popper.    The children had such a fun time playing and creating with their friends.  They loved wearing PJ's to school and were excited as can be.  We will work on filling our frog jar again for the next party!  I love positively reinforcing great behavior as we work on our social and emotional skills in JK.  

The children love cooking!  Stirring and working with their hands in any capacity is strongly encouraged to help with their fine motor skills.  Some of the children struggled with stirring batter, so I would love to see them peeling oranges at home, playing with play dough or clay, and climbing!

Fine Motor:
We created a craft project about our skit we are practicing, Five Little Pumpkins.  The children followed multistep instructions as well as placement instructions.  They cut out five pumpkins, carefully trying to cut all of the white part away from the pumpkins.  They are all doing a great job using the "thumbs up" for holding their scissors correctly.  They glued popsicle sticks to their paper, added the pumpkins on top of their "gate", wrote the five numbers corresponding to the pumpkins, placed their moon and bat, chose either a witch, ghost or spider to add, glued leaves to their pictures, and of course signed their work!  This gave us a great opportunity to talk about beside, beneath, over, under, etc.  Spacial awareness is important as an early math skill as well.
They finished their four seasons pictures we have been working on, representing all four seasons and what happens to the tree in each different season.

The children made sleep hats with moons and starts, and wore them for our PJ party!  

We are missing Bailey and Evan in this photo, but just a sneak preview of our class photo!

Math & Science:
We are recording our observations on our journal about our Indian Corn we have submerged in water.  We have talked about animals on the farm and specifics about what they eat and what they produce. We have counted, played our spider counting game, worked on categorizing items, used tally marks to vote on our favorite animals, and talked about how things are bigger or smaller as well as numbers being higher and lower.

Life on a farm requires early independence in the children living there.  The animals need to be fed and cleaned and cared for no matter the day or holiday or weather.  We talked about many scenarios about how farm children have chores and are responsible for these jobs each day from a very early age.  We challenged each child to come up with a couple of ideas of jobs they could do each morning or night to help them understand the cadence or routine that is ongoing for farm life.  This objective I love to implement with a screen free week or even two weeks in JK.  I loved the excuse of being able to blame this on one of my daughter's teachers when she was in JK, and how lovely it was for me to spend time with Lila (however depleted of energy I was) and to actually interact and do things I always want to do but can't seem to find the energy.

 Butterfly yoga pose!

Literacy:
The children illustrated, dictated and wrote words on their journal pages after we learned about milking cows.  They were excited to learn that a cow drinks the equivalent of a bathtub of water each day, sleeps standing up, and has four stomachs (or technically four chambers that act as four stomachs).

We have read many books this week including:  Dooby Dooby Moo, Lonely Scarecrow, Scarecrow, The Little Yellow Leaf, Woolbur, Barn Dance, Pig, Pigger, Piggest, Click Clack Quackity Quack,
I'm Trying to Love Spiders, Ducks in a Row, and many other farm related stories.  We will be reading non-fiction books next week and talking about chicks and eggs hatching!

I assessed the children for their writing readiness according to their ability to write 8 different lines/shapes (please see below)  If they are unable to write these lines/shapes they are not developmentally ready to write.  We will practice all of these lines and shapes as well as working on their names each day using Handwriting Without Tears.  Some children will be tracing shapes and letters until they are able to write them on their own.  Drawing lines and slanted lines, along with an "X" and a square, triangle and horizontal and vertical line is a great predictor that their fine motor/muscles are developed enough to correctly hold a writing instrument and begin learning the correct letter formation.  Before this time working to develop these muscles and eye-hand coordination is key, even if just practicing by drawing lines on a page.

On a more serious note, roughly half of all mental disorders start by the age of 14.  There are signs of anxiety in children younger and younger, and no child is anxiety free.  There are two instances when children cannot learn.  One is when they are bored, another is when they are anxious.  There are multiple ways to ease anxiety and we implement many of these in early childhood.  Please feel free to click on the below link to learn more about phrases and exercises that are helpful in alleviating anxiety.
https://www.gozen.com/49-phrases-to-calm-an-anxious-child/

I love these suggestions of the "TOP 10 Ideas to say in place of Stop Crying".
http://happinessishereblog.com/2017/01/10-things-say-instead-stop-crying/

Our pajama party was a huge success!  We made sleep hats and ate popcorn, watched a movie and enjoyed playing and laughing with our friends!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Susie

Good afternoon JK parents!

We are studying Autumn and the changing of the seasons this week, and are all excited about Halloween already!

 Sticker placement is a great exercise for fine motor skill improvement!  

Ms. Liubin with her baby, all dressed up... thanks to JKers!  

Our spider counting game is loads of fun and the children are practicing their counting and adding with manipulatives while loving socializing with their friends!

Math and Science:

We are conducting an experiment with Indian Corn, and have talked about what will happen if submerged in water for a week.  We are making predictions and documenting the progress each day.  Some of the children predict the corn will turn into pop corn, or shrink, or dissolve like jello!  Testing our ideas is so much fun.  We played a game with fruits and vegetables you would harvest and counted them and then wrote the corresponding number with our dry erase markers.  

We are using our time line to count and write our numbers.  We are also using manipulatives to help us with our counting.  Our sensory bin provides another center for studying fall objects.  

We went on a scavenger hunt for fall items outside, and talked about all of the changes we see in our environment.  

There are numerous benefits to writing on a vertical surface.  We write on the white board daily to develop literacy skill!  Our writing center is always full of words to copy, accompanied by pictures to help the children identify the object and letter sound.  Please follow this article to learn more about the benefits!  

 https://theinspiredtreehouse.com/motor-skills-and-more-working-on-a-vertical-surface/

Tracing our letters with a dot at the start point is great practice for our tripod grip and letter formation.  It is incredibly hard to begin at the top when forming letters, because children naturally want a baseline from which to start!  It takes lots of practice to form the good habit of starting from the top.

 We are working on using only lower case letters when appropriate.  These letters tend to be more curvy so more challenging for early childhood, but the correct way to write now benefits their reading and literacy as they move to Kindergarten!  White board provides a fun and new way to practice writing!

We are learning about the changing of the seasons, and everything that happens when the weather becomes colder.  The children are using their fine motor skills here to write and glue, following three step instructions.  We completed a chart as a class classifying things that happen in each season.  Some of our art work will have the class doing similar things, so their finished products look the same.  Sometimes their art will be completely different and they will have the freedom to follow whichever creative path they choose!  Please ask me about any specific projects and I will let you know which skill it is encouraging.  It is all with reason and intentional.

Have a wonderful weekend! I am off to an Irish Dance competition with Lila.  She is pictured below with her other love, which is soccer!  She's the second to the right of the trophy!  My weekends are full of driving her around for sure.

Here's Lila on the left with her BFF Izzy at the St. Patrick's Day Parade!  She is a little bigger now!

Ms. Massey