April 2011 Archives

click bellow for two short video clips of our small group today

Inga's and Rosie's environment-Medium.m4v

Aoife about Ant's environment-Medium.m4v

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Overview: This week in our classroom we will be continuing our themes of planting, shapes, and restaurants. The children will be able to investigate how plants grow by planting bean seeds. We also have two exciting cooking projects this week. The children will be able to help make bread with Robin's mom Anna and pizza with Brittany. The children's play in the restaurant will continue to be expanded as they see firsthand how to make pizza and as we implement more of their ideas into the restaurant center. Additionally it is our second week of small groups, which will make for a busy week of learning and exploring!

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: Blokus, Boggle Jr., crayons and notepad for Boggle word writing, Perfection, interlocking puzzles, construction floor puzzling, interlocking food puzzles, shape/fraction puzzles, interlockers
•Rationale: To introduce children to games with rules that relate to print awareness, numeral recognition, and knowledge of shape. To introduce children to simple ways to identify and describe shapes and to create new shapes from smaller shapes. To stimulate ideas for our restaurant in the dramatic play area we have food puzzles for the children to work with. We have added interlockers for the children to gain experience making, comparing, and measuring pattern creations, while working on problem solving and perceptual motor skills.
•Skills: print awareness, part-whole relationships, shape recognition and matching, shape combination, spatial awareness, one-to-one correspondence, turn-taking, social skills, perceptual motor skills, problem solving, patterning, measurement, comparison.

Expressive Arts (paint, play dough)
•Materials: primary color paint and mixing cups at the easel, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, glue, natural collage materials.
•Rationale: to explore new tools and media with hands and eyes, promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships and communication skills as children work on collaborative and individual projects. We added mixing cups to the easel area so the children can explore how different colors are made.
•Skills: creativity, artistic expression, fine motor development (strength, coordination), sharing ideas and materials, symbolic representation, color recognition
•Materials: play dough, rolling pins (smooth and spiky), pizza cutters, spatulas, pizza pans and trays
•Rationale: To promote sensory awareness and provide both a creative and social opportunity for children as they increase their fine motor skills. To begin representing ideas and objects in a 3-D medium. Additionally, the students can begin to create pizzas with the play dough to expand on our restaurant dramatic play theme.
•Skills: sensory input, symbolic representation, observation, sharing materials, and fine motor development (strength, coordination)

Sensory
•Materials: dirt, sand, bugs, sticks, trees
•Rationale: to allow and encourage experimentation with dirt, sand, and the natural objects one might find in dirt. We have been doing a lot of reading and discussing about planting and have planted some seeds in dirt. The sensory table will give children the opportunity to see what else we can do with dirt. We are adding sand to the table so the children can experiment with what happens when dirt and sand are combined.
•Skills: sensory input/developing an awareness of senses, thinking about insect habitats, observation of physical changes, creative thinking, fine motor, knowledge of physical properties/cause and effect, comparison, symbolic representation, sharing materials

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Restaurant center props (aprons, chef hats, cardboard pizza boxes, felt food, dishes), housekeeping and caretaking materials (furniture, dishes, food, babies, baby clothing), writing supplies (menus, paper, pencils, markers) dress-up fabric, shoes, accessories such as keys, cell phones, necklaces, and purses
•Rationale: Our dramatic play center continues to be the pizza restaurant this week. It continues to be relevant for them after our field trip to Duffy's pizza and with our upcoming pizza cooking project. To facilitate and strengthen dramatic play related to working at and visiting a restaurant. To follow the children's continued interest with making, ordering and delivering pizzas, pizza pans, oven, phone and notepad and pencils will be included. To encourage cooperative play and highlight another job, pizza deliver/waiter in our community and what it takes to perform that job.
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, peer interaction, turn taking, social problem solving, symbolic representation, literacy

Language and Literacy
Writing Center
•Materials: menus, food order forms, paper, alphabet stamps, a variety of writing utensils, scissors
•Rationale: to promote print and letter awareness while incorporating dramatic play with the menus and food order forms. We are going to spend more time encouraging children to use the menus to show the waiters and waitresses what they actually would like to order at the restaurant.
•Skills: awareness of print, connecting speech to print and print to speech, letter recognition, pre-writing, receptive language, fine motor, creative expression, social interaction, awareness of others, community building
Library
•Materials: Books about seeds, spring, and shapes. Books about restaurants, pizza, and other types of food.
•Rationale: to support pre-literacy skills, to familiarize children with new books, and to allow for quiet time in the classroom, to use books as resources for non-fiction information, to give the children ideas about other objects we could include in our dramatic play area and in our sensory table.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, awareness of print, listening, community building

Science
Table
•Materials: Magnifying glasses, flowers, paper, pencils, markers, measuring tools (rulers and tape measurers), dirt, pots, seeds, water, books about planting
•Rationale: Magnifying glasses enable the children to examine the flower growing in our classroom and notice changes in the flower as it grows. We have been doing a lot of talking about seeds and plants growing. This activity will give the students a chance to see a plant that is in the process of growing. Also, planting new seeds allows children to connect the previously explored seeds to the plants they grow into. The children will be able to practice watering the plants and discussing what plants need to grow.
•Skills: Exploration, fine motor, drawing, measuring, language
Caves
•Materials: light table, glass gems, light tiles with worms on them
•Rationale: In the caves the children will be able to explore using glass gems on the light table. To relate to our theme and discussion about planting we will be encouraging the children to create flowers, trees, and gardens using the glass gems. To introduce pattern making with another material.
•Skills: Fine motor, pattern constructing, memory expansion, color recognition, cooperation, planning skills, language, comparing

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, multi-colored shape blocks, small wooden cube blocks, small wooden rods, steering wheels, paper and pencils, easel, truck books
•Rationale: To foster current dramatic play themes, to encourage planful and purposeful approaches to building including drawing or writing plans and blueprints, to combine different materials in order to create new structures, to allow for individual building and collaborative work. We will highlight the use of unit blocks this week to emphasize shapes and part-whole comparisons made by putting different blocks together.
•Skills: large motor development, dramatic play, creating imaginary scenarios, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical and geometrical thinking

Large Motor
Gym
•Materials: target, upside down rocking boats, big foam triangle, donut, rolling mountain, hurdles, stairs, wobbly bridge, A-frame, empty boxes.
•Rationale: To encourage children's planning and movement awareness. To encourage turn-taking and risk taking. To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The wobbly bridge provides the opportunity to practice coordination between upper and lower body, build core strength and balance while the empty boxes allows for creative building and spatial awareness.
•Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills.
Playground
•Materials: shovels, buckets, wagons, swings, dishes for dramatic play, rakes, tricycles, and wagons
•Rationale: Digging in sand, riding trikes around the playground, and swinging on the swings create opportunities for social interaction, cooperation, role play, and many large motor experiences.
•Skills: upper and lower body strength, physical fitness, perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness), building community through social interactions.

Special Interest
• We are making bread and pizzas this week! We will also be continuing our small groups on bugs, planting, and shapes.

Snack
Monday - Making bread with Robin's mom
Wednesday - Making pizza with Brittany
Thursday - Trail Mix
*** All snacks are served with milk and water unless otherwise specified

May 18-19

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May 11

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May 4-5

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April 27-28

May 25-26

May 18-19

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May 11-12

May 11th - Today we thought about the steps involved in growing a bean plant. The children worked together to physically sequence pictures showing the steps. We then put together a song about growing a plant. The children offered their suggestions of movements and actions we could use for the song. At the end the season the group checked on the seeds they planted the week before. They noticed that the seed in water was getting bigger. They also took turns watering the seeds.

May 12th - We started our small group by looking at a plant that had grown from another plant. Part of the original plant was cut off and placed in water to grow a new plant. We examined the roots on the plant and discussed how it was possible for a plant to grow without a seed. By closely examining the plant the children did a drawing of the plant's roots. Next we went on a plant search outdoors. The children were given a guide of plants to look for when we walked outside. In addition to talking about the plants on the guide we discussed other plants we encountered as well. We looked closely at grass and debated whether or not grass was a plant. After deciding what qualifies as a plant the children came to the conclusion that grass is indeed a plant. To end our session we once again checked on our seed experiment. There were not any changes from the day before.

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May 4-5

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April 27-28

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May 25-26

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May 18-19

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May 11

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May 4-5

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April 27-28

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Overview
Spring has sprung! And there is no shortage of spring discussions and activities in the classroom. We have continued to add new plants and insects to the classroom atmosphere to get the children excited about springtime. We will continue to work on symmetry and lines this week by allowing the children to paint symmetrical insects as well as work with the projector to create their own symmetrical images and insects. The discussion of spring weather will continue as well as a new focus on different insects, plants and the weather. This week we will focus our discussions on insects; their life cycles, why do they emerge in spring, and where they hide to protect themselves. We will also begin to track the growth and development of the caterpillars that were added to the classroom. We will begin a journal of the insects that we can see outside, so please start to watch outside and track the new insects that are emerging in and around your house.

Expressive Arts
- Materials: Insects, flowers, projector, transparencies, crayons, thin and thick markers, colored pencils, tape, staplers, glue, paper punchers, construction paper, paint, table easels, think and thick brushes.
- Rationale: To allow children to connect their knowledge of insects and flowers while providing opportunities for children to continue working with lines and symmetry.
- Skills: Exploration of lines and symmetry, exploration of new materials, fine motor strength and control, self expression.

Science:
- Materials: Caterpillars, beetles, crickets, cockroach, fish, tadpole, mealworms, photos of insects, bee hive, symmetric insect cutouts, insect sorting baskets, photos of butterfly life cycle, clipboards, pencils, rulers.
- Rationale: To encourage children to explore insects and gain knowledge of the certain characteristics specific to insects. To deepen the children's understanding of the life cycles of certain insects while watching the caterpillars go through each stage.
- Skills: Scientific inquiry, observation, comparison, reasoning, investigation of the natural world, peer interactions, sorting, descriptive language.

Language and Literacy
- Materials: Books about spring, plants and insects. Pens, pencils, colored pencils, markers, staplers, tape, paper, envelopes. Magnetic boards, magnetic letters and pictures, stencils, journals.
- Rationale: The journals will be used to allow children to continue to track the growth of their Marigold plants and express their ideas of what insects look like. Children will be encouraged to use resources to continue to expand their knowledge of spring, plants and insects.
- Skills: Awareness of print, awareness of print that displays symmetry, self expression through talking, writing and drawing, awareness of the purpose of print and letter recognition, phonemic awareness, connecting speech to print and print to speech, fine motor, vocabulary, and social interactions.

Math and Manipulatives
- Materials: Interlocking puzzles, rulers, journals, button mosaics, insect and spring bingo, unifix cubes, weather graph.
- Rationale: To provide children the opportunity to continue to explore symmetry with the button mosaics, puzzles and images. Measure and record the growth of children's Marigold plants. Continue to track and graph the spring weather.
- Skills: Geometry, symmetry, patterns, reasoning, observations, classification, measuring, graphing, comparison, logical thinking.

Dramatic Play
- Materials: Back of the classroom: kitchen furniture, dishes, utensils, pots and pans, pretend food, small table, flowers, baskets and vases, animal costumes. Symbolic play caves: stuffed squirrels and owls, plastic woodland creatures, small and large wood pieces, turtles, cloth pieces, books, animal costumes.
- Rationale: Continue to explore spring and offer opportunities for social interactions and socio-dramatic play.
- Skills: Role-play, social interactions, large and fine motor skills, cooperation, problem solving skills, symbolic representation.

Blocks
- Materials: hollow wood blocks, unit blocks, thin boards, wood shapes, and plastic insects.
- Rationale: We continue to focus on symmetry. To provide children opportunities for creative play, creative building and symbolic play.
- Skills: balance, spatial awareness, cooperative play, creative building, large motor skills, social skills, symbolic representation.

Large Motor
Gym
- Materials: throw to the target, balls, upside down rocking boats, big foam triangle, donut, rolling mountain, hurdles, stairs, big foams shapes, wobbly bridge, ladder, A-frame, ropes, empty boxes.
- Rationale: To encourage children's planning and directional awareness. Engage in a start to finish obstacle course.
- Skills: Hand eye coordination, throwing, dynamic balance, core strength, balance and stability, jumping and landing, stepping up and down, coordination, body awareness, twisting, bending, fine and large motor, creative building and spatial awareness.
Playground
- Materials: Shovels, buckets, bikes, wagons.
- Rationale: Children are still very interested in using the bikes and wagons! They are also happy to dig, run and engage with peers.
- Skills: cardio vascular, endurance, upper and lower body strength, social skills, balance, movement through space, body awareness.

Special Interest
Large Group
During large group, we will continue our discussion and tracking of spring weather. We will also be discussing all the different insects that can be seen in spring around school as well as home. Children will be introduced to and focusing on the life cycles of insects while also focusing on the features that make up insects.

Parents
We would love to have you discuss with children the different insects that are emerging outside and if possible have the children track and journal about which insects they have seen outside at home. Thank you and we appreciate the help!

Have a great week!
Heather

Julianna Lead Teaching

Overview
Spring is continuous both inside and outside of our classroom. To elaborate on an initial interest in birds and turtles and their needs from previous weeks, we are introducing zoo materials in the loft dramatic play space. This will allow children to continue to explore what animals eat, where they live and other lifestyle patterns. We will also be using a bird feeder outside of our classroom window to continue observations of birds eating. The water table has also seen a revamp based on children's interest: the water table is now a fully functional baby-washing station. This allows children to role play as they learn how to care for babies during bath time using soap, loofahs and a baby sized-bath. To continue with the always-popular theme of construction, we are moving toward a focus of riding in cars by creating opportunities for children to "build" cars with blocks, wear seatbelts and drive with a steering wheel. They can even take a trip to the zoo! Provided the weather cooperates, more small-group style walks out of the classroom to look for worms, signs of spring, animals and other interests of the children will continue to happen. This gives children a smaller setting in which to bond with other children and take on a leadership position in a more comfortable way.

Large Group

This week our large groups will focus on babies and caregiving. We will reflect on Ayuko's visit this past Friday by reading stories about babies. Some letter writing will occur to reflect on a past theme of the post office and to give children opportunities to practice fine motor skills in a group setting. Movement, poetry, songs, book reading and fingerplays will all be used during large group this week.

Expressive Arts

Materials: different colored paint and brushes to paint the already-produced collage with natural materials from last week. Rationale: To help children use color as expression and practice painting a 3-D object. To work on a project over a few days, so that the children will be able to see their creation as a process, and then to display the final product to beautify our classroom. To engage in a social art experience over a period of time. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

Sensory
Materials: Glurch and tools to manipulate it: cookie cutters and rotary cutters early in the week, adding and switching out tools later in the week.
Rationale: To encourage children to compare and contrast this with the play dough, to invite scientific inquiry and exploration of the mysterious properties of glurch. Switching play dough for glurch also may encourage children who don't often use play dough to come to this area.
Skills: Fine motor, comparison, hypothesis, communication, problem solving, symbolic representation, and trial and error.

Water Table:
Materials: plastic baby dolls, empty shampoo and conditioner bottles, loofahs, baby bath and cups for pouring over the babies' heads.
Rationale: This encourages children to practice an authentic skill of washing babies by allowing them to experience it at the water table. Many children have (new) younger siblings at home, so this allows for connections between home and school. Likewise the delicate operation of hair washing they experience may also be experienced from another viewpoint. Skills: cooperative skills, collaboration, turn-taking, role-playing, communication and fine motor.

Science
Materials: flashlights, mirrors, other interesting and shiny surfaces, cellophane and rubber bands
Rationale: Give children the opportunity to explore light and shadow in the darkness of the cave. Allow for the continued interest in colored cellophane from last week's cave theme to carry over here as they project colored light from their flashlights.
Skills: comparison, hypothesis, experimentation, problem solving, turn-taking, cause and effect, and observing

Outside
Materials: balls, basketball hoop or soccer goals, trucks, shovels, rakes, buckets, trucks, tricycles or scooter cars.
Rationale: Allow children to explore varied levels of fine and gross motor skills, depending on their preference.
Skill: fine and gross motor skills, turn taking, problem solving, collaboration, experimentation, balance, coordination

Math and Manipulatives

Materials: Puzzles of flowers, tools, birds and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.

Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).

Materials: Small building logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.

Materials: Adult-baby matching puzzle. Rationale: To practice matching and explore the concept of animal babies

Language and Literacy

Materials: books about springtime, zoo animals, cars, babies, birds, shadows and other curriculum-inspired topics
Rationale: To allow children to make connections between what they're reading and the classroom or home. To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts such as page-turning and holding it correctly.
Skills: Concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information, using books as inspiration for play or visual representation

Blocks

Materials: model trucks, "seatbelts", steering wheels, "horns," pictures of different types of cars
Rationale: Allow children to elaborate on their interest in riding in a car. They can go to pretend destinations while driving and build their own car.
Skills: role playing, collaboration, team work, imaginative play, hand-eye coordination, part-whole relationships, symbolic representation, balance, story telling

Large Motor

Materials: A-frame, "rope maze." Skills: static balance (twisting, bending, stretching), coordination, core strength, imaginative play

Materials: stairs, foam triangle and blue donut, platform, foam roller slide. Skills: upper and lower body strength, coordination, stability and balance, risk taking, turn taking

Materials: stairs, bolsters, inverted monkey bars with swinging bridge. Skills: balance, coordination, stability, risk taking, core strength, turn taking

Music/Movement
Materials: piano, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals, sandpaper blocks, bells, small scarves
Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of noises from a musical instrument.To engage in physical movement in time to music, using a scarf as a prop
Skill: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of others, cause and effect, imitation

Snacks:
Tuesday - Trail Mix
Friday - Fruit and Cracker

Mondays
11:45-12:30 Teachers' meeting and environment preparation
12:30-12:50 Gym
12:50-1:10 Large Group
1:10-1:35 Small Group Work
1:35-2:20 Free Play (clean up)
2:20-2:40 Washing hands and Snack
2:40-3:15 Get ready and outdoor play
3:15-3:30 Pick up and good byes
3:30-5:00 Teachers clean up, discussion and planning

Wednesdays and Thursdays (we will extend Thursdays' explore time if we have a cooking activity that day)
11:45-12:30 Teachers' meeting and environment preparation
12:30-12:45 Explore time
12:45-1:00 Large Group
1:00-1:25 Small Group Work
1:25-2:20 Free Play (clean up)
2:20-2:40 Washing hands and Snack
2:40-3:15 Get ready and outdoor play
3:15-3:30 Pick up and good byes
3:30-5:00 Teachers clean up, discussion and planning

Weekly Lesson Plan for Ross' Class
April 25-29, 2011
Lead Teaching This Week: Jessica

Overview: This week we will be supporting the interest of the theatre by encouraging the children to expand on their plays. The supplies at the art table and writing center will support the creation of props and costumes, helping the children extend their dramatic play. The children's plants have been sprouting and we will be helping the children to observe the changes, measure their plants, and record their observations in their journals. We will continue our focus on how to care for the plants and guinea pigs in our room, teaching the children about responsibility. We started small groups last week and are excited to begin exploring our topics!

Expressive Art (paint, collage, clay)
• Materials: Art Table: pencils, pens, materials for creating masks, costumes, or props (paper, feathers, markers, glue, tape), and various natural materials for collage (wool, paper shreds, yarn, twigs, etc.).
Clay Table: clay, thick wire, tools for carving/sculpting, sculpting "accessories" (e.g. wood beads, glass gems, popsicle sticks, bottle caps).
• Rationale: Last week at the art table a few children created hats and monsters for their theater plays. Intriguing materials will be available to inspire children's creation of props and costume accessories for their dramatic play. There has been some interest at the art easel in mixing colors to see what they create. Pain-mixing supplies (e.g. empty containers, spoons, extra paint) will be available for the children to continue their exploration of color mixing. At the clay table the children will continue their exploration of using the clay and tools available to create representational objects and to express their creativity.
• Skills: Fine motor skills, creative and artistic expression, symbolic representation, concepts of color, critical thinking and planning skills, social skills

Sensory (Soil Table)
• Materials: Planting soil, shovels, hand rakes, rocks, twigs, and insects
• Rationale: The children have been actively exploring the soil at the sensory table. Discussions about the "bugs" that were added last week and lead to conversations about "where do bugs really live?" The teachers will continue to add materials to area to engage the children and further their inquiring about what soil is, its purpose, and how it may (or may not) be homes to many living things.
• Skills: social skills, generalizing, scientific thinking and reasoning, knowledge about the world around them, and symbolic representation.

Math and Manipulative
• Materials: puzzles that highlight classroom topics (i.e. plants and insects), games with rules (i.e. Snail's Pace), pre-/early literacy game Boggle Jr., shape and spatial awareness puzzles.
• Rationale: The children have really enjoyed the addition of the various games (with rules), and have been observed asking one another to play as well as explaining how the games are played. Not only are these games supporting self-regulation, turn taking, and executive function skills, they are also supporting many academic-content skills (i.e. counting, numeracy, 1-to-1 correspondence).
• Skills: shape awareness, 1-to-1 correspondence, turn-taking skills, social skills

Science
• Materials: At the Table: planted pots, notebook, magnifying glasses, pencils, rulers, crayons
In the cave: multi link cubes for plant/flower making, felt boards and felt pieces
• Rationale: This week the children will continue to care for their sprouting seeds/beans, observing and recording the changes in their journals. They will hypothesize about how the plant will look, measure how tall their plants have grown, and compare the changes with their previous journal drawings. The bug group also just "received" some caterpillars to study, and they will share their observations about the changes they see with the class as the week continues.
• Skills: Observation, scientific thinking and reasoning, hypothesis creating and testing, social skills, measurement- length, independence, symbolic representation.

The "Nook"
• Materials: projector, old tape rolls, wires, various objects around the classroom to experiment with light and shadows.
• Rationale: Last week the guinea pigs were moved into the classroom and the nook has been used as an area for the children to hold the guinea pigs. This week we will reintroduce the projector for the children to experiment with shadow play. We hope to promote interactive play by using the projector to cast light through a curtain in the nook's window. If any family has an old (or extra) white sheet that we could borrow/use for our curtain, that would be very helpful!
• Skills: responsibility/pet-care skills, turn taking, following directions, hypothesis creating/testing, artistic expression.

Language and Literacy
• Materials: writing supplies (lines/unlined paper, markers, pencils, pens), props for making tickets and money, alphabet stamps, tape, stickers
• Rationale: Last week the children used the writing center to create tickets, make signs, and invitations for their theatre and dramatic play. With the continued excitement of the theatre play in the classroom the teachers will continue to provide support for the children to practice their pre-/early literacy and writing skills.
• Skills: awareness of writing and concepts of print, pre-/early literacy skills, fine motor strength and coordination, letter recognition and awareness.

Dramatic Play
• Materials: fabric, dress-up shoes, hats, masks, capes, keys, scarves, cell phones, play food and flatware, theatre props, costumes
• Rationale: The arrangement for the classroom theatre has inspired many children to participate in exciting and new dramatic play opportunities. The children have been inventing their own stories and the teachers have been writing them down for the children to create their own plays. The children have been creating a variety of props and costumes to use for their performances. Last week the children we excited to watch a performance from Amy's class (from last year), and many new ideas for stories/plays were generated and the excitement has resurfaced!
• Skills: social skills, cooperative skills, creativity, storytelling skills, discussion and problem solving, planning and brainstorming.

Blocks
• Materials: Large hollow blocks, unit blocks, long/short planks, wood cubes
• Rationale: A few large hollow blocks have been arranged to create a stage for our classroom theatre. The children have been using the remaining blocks to create props for their play such as dinosaurs, vehicles, and highchairs. This week we will continue to use the blocks to build upon the children's plays, encouraging the children's utilization of representational thought.
• Skills: large motor strength and coordination, fine motor skills, social skills, creativity, symbolic representation, concepts of balance and stability.

Large Motor
• Materials: In the gym: steps, rolling mountain, hurdles, "bumpy road," wobbly bridge, target for throwing balls, boxes for building.
Playground: tricycles, buckets, shovels, sticks, pinecones, climber, monkey bars, swings
• Rationale: This week the gym equipment has been rearranged to create an obstacle course. The new arrangement provides an opportunity for the children to challenge their physical abilities and try new skills in a fun and requires them to utilize many physical skills simultaneously to complete the obstacle course! We hope the weather continues to warm this week so we can spend more time on the playground and participating in outdoor activities.
• Skills: eye-hand/eye-foot coordination, upper and lower body strength/coordination/endurance, static and dynamic balance, spatial awareness, physical risk taking, construction skills.

Special Interest/Announcements
• Small groups have started and the children are quite excited! Be sure to ask you child about small groups during the week and share any interesting comments/conversations with the teachers. Sometimes what comes up at home and influence an area/topic of investigation for the rest of the group!
• We will practice a fire and tornado drill this week...a sign will be on the "Question of the Day" board to let you know what day the drills will be happening.

Snack
Monday - Applesauce & animal crackers
Tuesday - Popcorn
Wednesday - Rice cakes & craisins
Thursday - Crackers & fruit
Friday- Pizza (made by the children with Jocelyn!)

Weekly Lesson Plan for Ross' Class
April 25-29, 2011
Lead Teaching This Week: Jessica

Overview: This week we will be supporting the interest of the theatre by encouraging the children to expand on their plays. The supplies at the art table and writing center will support the creation of props and costumes, helping the children extend their dramatic play. The children's plants have been sprouting and we will be helping the children to observe the changes, measure their plants, and record their observations in their journals. We will continue our focus on how to care for the plants and guinea pigs in our room, teaching the children about responsibility. We started small groups last week and are excited to begin exploring our topics!

Expressive Art (paint, collage, clay)
• Materials: Art Table: pencils, pens, materials for creating masks, costumes, or props (paper, feathers, markers, glue, tape), and various natural materials for collage (wool, paper shreds, yarn, twigs, etc.).
Clay Table: clay, thick wire, tools for carving/sculpting, sculpting "accessories" (e.g. wood beads, glass gems, popsicle sticks, bottle caps).
• Rationale: Last week at the art table a few children created hats and monsters for their theater plays. Intriguing materials will be available to inspire children's creation of props and costume accessories for their dramatic play. There has been some interest at the art easel in mixing colors to see what they create. Pain-mixing supplies (e.g. empty containers, spoons, extra paint) will be available for the children to continue their exploration of color mixing. At the clay table the children will continue their exploration of using the clay and tools available to create representational objects and to express their creativity.
• Skills: Fine motor skills, creative and artistic expression, symbolic representation, concepts of color, critical thinking and planning skills, social skills

Sensory (Soil Table)
• Materials: Planting soil, shovels, hand rakes, rocks, twigs, and insects
• Rationale: The children have been actively exploring the soil at the sensory table. Discussions about the "bugs" that were added last week and lead to conversations about "where do bugs really live?" The teachers will continue to add materials to area to engage the children and further their inquiring about what soil is, its purpose, and how it may (or may not) be homes to many living things.
• Skills: social skills, generalizing, scientific thinking and reasoning, knowledge about the world around them, and symbolic representation.

Math and Manipulative
• Materials: puzzles that highlight classroom topics (i.e. plants and insects), games with rules (i.e. Snail's Pace), pre-/early literacy game Boggle Jr., shape and spatial awareness puzzles.
• Rationale: The children have really enjoyed the addition of the various games (with rules), and have been observed asking one another to play as well as explaining how the games are played. Not only are these games supporting self-regulation, turn taking, and executive function skills, they are also supporting many academic-content skills (i.e. counting, numeracy, 1-to-1 correspondence).
• Skills: shape awareness, 1-to-1 correspondence, turn-taking skills, social skills

Science
• Materials: At the Table: planted pots, notebook, magnifying glasses, pencils, rulers, crayons
In the cave: multi link cubes for plant/flower making, felt boards and felt pieces
• Rationale: This week the children will continue to care for their sprouting seeds/beans, observing and recording the changes in their journals. They will hypothesize about how the plant will look, measure how tall their plants have grown, and compare the changes with their previous journal drawings. The bug group also just "received" some caterpillars to study, and they will share their observations about the changes they see with the class as the week continues.
• Skills: Observation, scientific thinking and reasoning, hypothesis creating and testing, social skills, measurement- length, independence, symbolic representation.

The "Nook"
• Materials: projector, old tape rolls, wires, various objects around the classroom to experiment with light and shadows.
• Rationale: Last week the guinea pigs were moved into the classroom and the nook has been used as an area for the children to hold the guinea pigs. This week we will reintroduce the projector for the children to experiment with shadow play. We hope to promote interactive play by using the projector to cast light through a curtain in the nook's window. If any family has an old (or extra) white sheet that we could borrow/use for our curtain, that would be very helpful!
• Skills: responsibility/pet-care skills, turn taking, following directions, hypothesis creating/testing, artistic expression.

Language and Literacy
• Materials: writing supplies (lines/unlined paper, markers, pencils, pens), props for making tickets and money, alphabet stamps, tape, stickers
• Rationale: Last week the children used the writing center to create tickets, make signs, and invitations for their theatre and dramatic play. With the continued excitement of the theatre play in the classroom the teachers will continue to provide support for the children to practice their pre-/early literacy and writing skills.
• Skills: awareness of writing and concepts of print, pre-/early literacy skills, fine motor strength and coordination, letter recognition and awareness.

Dramatic Play
• Materials: fabric, dress-up shoes, hats, masks, capes, keys, scarves, cell phones, play food and flatware, theatre props, costumes
• Rationale: The arrangement for the classroom theatre has inspired many children to participate in exciting and new dramatic play opportunities. The children have been inventing their own stories and the teachers have been writing them down for the children to create their own plays. The children have been creating a variety of props and costumes to use for their performances. Last week the children we excited to watch a performance from Amy's class (from last year), and many new ideas for stories/plays were generated and the excitement has resurfaced!
• Skills: social skills, cooperative skills, creativity, storytelling skills, discussion and problem solving, planning and brainstorming.

Blocks
• Materials: Large hollow blocks, unit blocks, long/short planks, wood cubes
• Rationale: A few large hollow blocks have been arranged to create a stage for our classroom theatre. The children have been using the remaining blocks to create props for their play such as dinosaurs, vehicles, and highchairs. This week we will continue to use the blocks to build upon the children's plays, encouraging the children's utilization of representational thought.
• Skills: large motor strength and coordination, fine motor skills, social skills, creativity, symbolic representation, concepts of balance and stability.

Large Motor
• Materials: In the gym: steps, rolling mountain, hurdles, "bumpy road," wobbly bridge, target for throwing balls, boxes for building.
Playground: tricycles, buckets, shovels, sticks, pinecones, climber, monkey bars, swings
• Rationale: This week the gym equipment has been rearranged to create an obstacle course. The new arrangement provides an opportunity for the children to challenge their physical abilities and try new skills in a fun and requires them to utilize many physical skills simultaneously to complete the obstacle course! We hope the weather continues to warm this week so we can spend more time on the playground and participating in outdoor activities.
• Skills: eye-hand/eye-foot coordination, upper and lower body strength/coordination/endurance, static and dynamic balance, spatial awareness, physical risk taking, construction skills.

Special Interest/Announcements
• Small groups have started and the children are quite excited! Be sure to ask you child about small groups during the week and share any interesting comments/conversations with the teachers. Sometimes what comes up at home and influence an area/topic of investigation for the rest of the group!
• We will practice a fire and tornado drill this week...a sign will be on the "Question of the Day" board to let you know what day the drills will be happening.

Snack
Monday - Applesauce & animal crackers
Tuesday - Popcorn
Wednesday - Rice cakes & craisins
Thursday - Crackers & fruit
Friday- Pizza (made by the children with Jocelyn!)

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Overview:
This week the children will continue their paths of discovery related to spring, plants, and insects. The children will also have an opportunity to break into their small groups with the different student teachers and focus more on plants, water, and insects in a smaller more focused setting. Graphing and daily journaling the children's observations, questions, and new ideas about the new plant life or insects in our classroom will be the biggest change throughout this next week. The children will have ample opportunities to explore the changing environments both in our classroom and around our school with their small groups to take notice of the changes taking place in the environment. We will re-introduce painting at the easels so the children can continue their work with line using a new artistic medium.

Expressive Art Area
Materials: black paint with thin brushes at the easels, markers, crayons, colored pencils, stencils, tape, glue, and paper
Rationale: To enhance the children's observation skills by encouraging them to use lines as a way to represent plant and insect specimens as well as collect data. By adding in the easels and paint the children will be able to expand their current knowledge lines. Gradually the children will be introduced to filling in the spaces between lines with color.
Skills: creative expression, fine motor skills, showing emotions or expressions through creative drawings or work, and responding to others or their own art work.

Sensory Area
Materials: planted seeds, water cans, dirt, journals
Rationale: The children will have an opportunity to watch their own plant grow before their eyes. They will also become aware of the effort needed to help a plant grow and better understand the needs of a growing seed. As time goes on the children will be able to see the end result of hard work and the beauty of growing plants.
Skills: discovery, developing topical awareness and knowledge, seeking out information when needed, observing and recording skills. The children will also have an opportunity to compare growing plants and express wonder about the natural world.

Science Area
Materials: mounted insects, light table, crickets, mealworms, caterpillars, and magnifying glasses
Rationale: The children have expressed further interest in the abundance of new insects on the playground, in our classroom and in the children's homes. This is great opportunity to expose the children to insects for a much closer look. As the children learn the different parts of insects and the importance of insects in our world this part of our classroom will encourage children to learn and explore more about the insects and their life cycles.
Skills: The children will use their senses to explore their own environment, identify physical characteristics using tools, express wonder about the natural world and ask questions. During this exploration the teachers will encourage children to seek out answers in books or other resources. Emergent writing will be applicable when the children use their journals to record their ideas and observations.

Math and Manipulatives
Materials: Koi fish puzzles, sunken garden symmetry, mosaic buttons, spring bingo, bug matching game, insect sorting, thermometers, and rulers.
Rationale: We will encourage children to find symmetry in the natural world as it can be found in insects and plants. Measurement is encouraged as part of the data collection related to weather changes and plant growth. Sorting, and matching skills will be facilitated through games and puzzles.
Skills: sorting, symmetry, matching, measurement, reasoning, logical thinking, comparisons, and making predictions.

Language & Literacy Area
Materials: magnet letter board with pictures, alphabet in writing center, new seeds with names, insects with names and drawing area. New insect, plant, and wildlife books, and story books with tape player, 'question of the day'.
Rationale: The signs and materials we have provided use both words and visual prompts support to early literacy in our classroom. The question of the day at morning arrival gives all children exposure to the idea that all letters in a combination represent meaning. Prompted conversation during snack time allows children to communicate emotions, ideas, and hold conversations with others.
Skills: Begin to recognize and names letters and associate sounds with letters, use language for a variety of purposes, and engage in writing using letter-like symbols to make letters or words.

Block Area
Materials: Insects, bugs, plant life- vines.
Rationale: The children have been showing increased interest in the role of insects in their block creations. As the children continue to build homes and incorporate the insects in their play the children will also have the opportunity to add plant life to their buildings. In this way the children can make their insect homes more realistic to the world around them. As children continue to expand their understanding of insects, they will have opportunities to add depth to their play.
Skills: small muscle control, geometric sense, spatial and construction skills

Dramatic Play
Materials: Flowers, kitchen set with food, woodland animals and habitat materials, sunglasses, frog and bird costumes, and music.
Rationale: The children have been learning a lot about the animals as they emerge and become more active during the springtime. As we continue to learn about animals, the children can use the materials in the dramatic play area to represent their understanding and engage one another in pretend play.
Skills: Creative expression, social problem solving, self-expression, group cooperation. To sustain interaction by cooperation, helping, sharing, and expressing interest, using constructive words and strategies to resolve conflict.

Large Motor Gym
Materials: obstacle course including uneven walking surfaces, cushioned incline, rolling mountain, hurdles, stairs, bumpy walk, and wobbly bridge. Building materials are available as well as balls with a target.
Rationale: The obstacle course encourages cardio-vascular endurance as the children participate in a series of physical challenges.
Skills: dynamic balance, upper-body strength, balance/stability, jumping and landing, crawling, stepping up, core-strength, body awareness, spatial awareness, target practice, creative and cooperative building.

Playground
Materials: Shovels, rakes, buckets, mini shovels, chalk, tricycles, kites, and side walk chalk
Rationale: The children have found lots of wonderful things outside that relate our classroom activities. The teachers encourage children to work together, digging, swinging, making ice cream and exploring other creative ideas. Our goal is to provide materials that inspire investigation, motor engagement and dramatic play.
Skills: Cardiovascular endurance, fine and large motor skills, creative expression, observation and reasoning, eye-hand coordination, exploring the environment around them with the equipment and tools available.

Snack
Monday - Pizza
Tuesday - Popcorn & milk
Wednesday - Rice cakes & craisins
Thursday - Crackers & fruit
Friday- Animal crackers & milk

Overview: Last week was exciting and busy for our classroom as we went to Duffy's Pizza on Wednesday and the children got many ideas for expanding our pizza restaurant. They also got to explore our new soil sensory table. This week we will be continuing with implementing the children's ideas into the restaurant, and expanding on our theme of seeds and planting by taking a closer look at our plants, measuring them, and seeing how much they've grown. This week will also bring with it our first student teacher cooking project, as Elizabeth A. makes strawberry banana smoothies with the children. Small groups will also start this week. Our group themes for small group will be: Seeds and planting, Bugs, and Shapes.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: Blokus, Boggle Jr., crayons and notepad for Boggle word writing, Perfection, interlocking puzzles, construction floor puzzling, interlocking food puzzles, shape/fraction puzzles
•Rationale: To introduce children to games with rules that relate to print awareness, numeral recognition, and knowledge of shape. To introduce children to simple ways to identify and describe shapes and to create new shapes from smaller shapes. To introduce children to our upcoming restaurant in the dramatic play area we have food puzzle for the children to work with. The construction floor puzzle was a preferred choice last week so we will continue to have it out and encourage the children to work together to put it together.
•Skills: print awareness, part-whole relationships, shape recognition and matching, shape combination, spatial awareness, one-to-one correspondence, turn-taking, social skills.

Expressive Arts (paint, playdough)
•Materials: primary color paint and bubble wrap at the easel, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, natural collage materials.
•Rationale: to explore new tools and media with hands and eyes, promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships and communication skills as children work on collaborative and individual projects. We added the bubble wrap this week to concentrate on texture and allow the children to explore what patterns they can make with different objects.
•Skills: creativity, artistic expression, fine motor development (strength, coordination), sharing ideas and materials, symbolic representation, color recognition
•Materials: playdough, rolling pins (smooth and spiky), pizza cutters, spatchulas, pizza pan and trays
•Rationale: Since the field trip to Duffy's Pizza, the children have been interest in creating and working with pizza dough, so playdough was provided to extend this interest. To promote sensory awareness and provide both a creative and social opportunity for children as they increase their fine motor skills. To begin representing ideas and objects in a 3-D medium. Additionally, the students can begin to create pizzas with the playdough to expand on our restaurant dramatic play theme.
•Skills: sensory input, symbolic representation, observation, sharing materials, and fine motor development (strength, coordination)

Sensory
•Materials: dirt, bugs, sticks, trees
•Rationale: to allow and encourage experimentation with dirt and the natural objects one might find in dirt. We have been doing a lot of reading and discussing about planting and have actually planted some seeds in dirt. The sensory table will give children the opportunity to see what else we can do with dirt. During the week we will brainstorm ideas with the children about what else we could add to the dirt.
•Skills: sensory input/developing an awareness of senses, thinking about insect habitats, observation of physical changes, creative thinking, fine motor, knowledge of physical properties/cause and effect, comparison, symbolic representation, sharing materials

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Restaurant center props (aprons, chef hats, cardboard pizza boxes, felt food, dishes), housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), writing supplies (menus, paper, pencils, markers) dress-up fabric, shoes, accessories such as keys, cell phones, necklaces, and purses
•Rationale: Our dramatic play center continues to be the pizza restaurant this week, it continues to be relevant for them after our field trip to Duffy's pizza. To facilitate and strengthen dramatic play related to working at and visiting a restaurant. To follow the children's continued interest with making, ordering and delivering pizzas, pizza pans, oven, phone and notepad and pencils will be included. To encourage cooperative play and highlight another job, pizza deliver/waiter in our community and what it takes to perform that job.
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, peer interaction, turn taking, social problem solving, symbolic representation, literacy

Language and Literacy
Writing Center
•Materials: menus, food order forms, paper, alphabet stamps, a variety of writing utensils, scissors
•Rationale: to promote print and letter awareness while incorporating dramatic play with the menus and food order forms. We are going to spend more time encouraging children to use the menus to show the waiters and waitresses what they actually would like to buy at the restaurant.
•Skills: awareness of print, connecting speech to print and print to speech, letter recognition, pre-writing, receptive language, fine motor, creative expression, social interaction, awareness of others, community building
Library
•Materials: Books about seeds, spring, and shapes. Books about restaurants, pizza, and other types of food have also been added.
•Rationale: to support pre-literacy skills, to familiarize children with new books, and to allow for quiet time in the classroom, to use books as resources for non-fiction information, to give the children ideas about other objects we could include in our dramatic play area and in our sensory table.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, awareness of print, listening, community building

Science
Table
Materials: Magnifying glasses, flowers, paper, pencils, markers, measuring tools (rulers and tape measurers), dirt, pots, seeds, water
Rationale: Magnifying glasses enable the children to examine the flower growing in our classroom and notice changes in the flower as it grows. We have been doing a lot of talking about seeds and plants growing. This activity will give the students a chance to see a plant that is in the process of growing. We are adding the measuring tools so the students can measure how much the plant grows. Also, planting new seeds allows children to connect the previously explored seeds to the plants they grow into. The children will be able to practice watering the plants and discussing what plants need to grow.
Skills: Exploration, fine motor, drawing, measuring, language
Caves:
Materials: Colored linking blocks, paper, markers, Legos, Felt board and felt petals
Rationale: In the caves we have been letting the children explore with the colored linking blocks. The children have shown interest in created flowers, trees, and gardens. This week we are going to encourage them to continue to make flowers and begin to talk about patterns. As teachers make patterns with the blocks and felt board and describe patterns, children will be able to explore with the blocks to create patterns of their own. The Legos will give the children another tool to create flowers with. The children can compare and contrast the flowers made out of Legos and the flowers made out of linking blocks.
Skills: Fine motor, pattern constructing, memory expansion, color recognition, cooperation, planning skills, language, comparing

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, multi-colored shape blocks, small wooden cube blocks, small wooden rods, steering wheels, paper and pencils, easel, truck books
•Rationale: To foster current dramatic play themes, to encourage planful and purposeful approaches to building including drawing or writing plans and blueprints, to combine different materials in order to create new structures, to allow for individual building and collaborative work. The children can use the truck books to create delivery trucks for our restaurant. This will tie together the block area and the dramatic play areas to create a more social, collaborative classroom.
•Skills: large motor development, dramatic play, creating imaginary scenarios, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking

Large Motor
Gym
Materials: target, upside down rocking boats, big foam triangle, donut, rolling mountain, hurdles, stairs, wobbly bridge, A-frame, empty boxes.
- Rationale: To encourage children's planning and movement awareness. To encourage turn-taking and risk taking. To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The wobbly bridge provides the opportunity to practice coordination between upper and lower body, build core strength and balance while the empty boxes allows for creative building and spatial awareness.
•Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills.

Playground
•Materials: shovels, buckets, wagons, swings, dishes for dramatic play, rakes, tricycles, and wagons
•Rationale: The children have been enjoying digging and transporting the sand using the wagons, pulling the wagons around with their friends and riding the bikes. They enjoy running, going on the swings, playing hide-seek, and digging while engaging in social interactions, cooperation, role play, and lots of large motor experiences.
•Skills: upper and lower body strength, physical fitness, perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness), building community through social interactions.

Special Interest
• This we will starting our small groups and making smoothies!

Snack
Monday - Strawberry banana smoothies
Wednesday - Pretzels & apples
Thursday - Toast & milk
*** All snacks are served with milk and water unless otherwise specified

Overview
As we are exploring all of the marvelous changes that spring brings we will continue to bring new insects and plants into our classroom. We will incorporate symmetry and lines this week by painting images that have show symmetry and lines. We will expand on the topic of spring weather by discussing why plants bloom in the spring, why insects come out of hibernation, and why can plants and insects survive during the springtime as we experience new bugs in our classroom and track our Marigold seed growth. We will also start a spring weather journal for our classroom, so please keep quotes and drawings coming, to add those to it!

Expressive Arts
- Materials: various seeds, flowers, insects, thick and thin markers, colored pencils, crayons, tape, glue, staplers, paper punchers, construction paper, paint, thin brushes, table easels.
- Rationale: To build on children's understanding of lines, symmetry, and shapes.
- Skills: exploration of lines and shapes, exploration of materials, observation, fine motor strength and control, self-expression.

Sensory
- Materials: sensory table with sand, water, frogs, lizards, snakes, trees, sticks, and rocks.
- Rationale: To offer opportunities for sensory exploration while connecting our topic of life cycles with objects found during spring. Springtime bring lots of rain and precipitation so we will incorporate water to show the effects that water can have on the ground (sand), insects, plants, animals and environment. Provide opportunities for social interactions and symbolic-dramatic play.
- Skills: sensory stimulations, free exploration, symbolic representations, social interactions.

Science
- Materials: baby caterpillars, beetles, and crickets on light table, photos of insects, symmetric insects cutouts, insects, insect sorting baskets (depending on characteristics), photos of flowers, Marigold plants, clipboards, pencils, rulers, mealworms, caterpillars, tadpole, fish.
- Rationale: To connect life cycles with our spring curriculum topics. Provide opportunities to enrich social interactions and knowledge about life cycles as we observe and examine how different insects and plants grow. Understanding how the weather can affect plant growth and insect life.
- Skills: scientific inquiry, observation, comparison, reasoning, investigation, explorations, social skills, sorting, descriptive language, self-expression (journal entries, Marigold growth tracking)

Language and Literacy
- Materials: books about: spring, weather, insects, plants and flowers. Spring Bingo, journals, magnetic letter tiles, pens, pencils, markers, staplers, tape, paper, envelopes, stencils.
- Rationale: Our journals will be used to keep track of our Marigold seed growth along with children's comments and drawings. The children will be encouraged to use information resources to explore the topics of weather, insects, and plant growth present in the classroom.
- Skills: awareness of print, self-expression, writing, drawing, awareness of the purpose of print and letter recognition, phonemic awareness, connecting speech to print and print to speech, fine motor, vocabulary, social skills, observation, recording.

Math and Manipulatives
- Materials: Puzzles of: spring insects, plants, flowers, and seeds (fruit). Button mosaics, rulers, journals, spring and insect Bingo, unifix cubes, measuring our plants' growth and tracking it in our journals, and weather graph.
- Rationale: To continue to provide opportunities for children to explore symmetry though puzzles, images, and button mosaics. Measure and graph plant growth of our Marigold seeds. Track and measure spring weather using a bar graph.
- Skills: geometry, symmetry, patterns, reasoning, observation, classification, comparison, matching, logical thinking.

Dramatic Play
- Materials: Back of the Classroom: kitchen furniture, utensils, dishes, pots and pans, pretend food, small table, flowers, baskets and vases, animal costumes. Symbolic Play Cave: stuffed squirrels, stuffed owls, plastic woodland animals, turtles, pieces of wood, cloth pieces, animal costumes, books.
- Rationale: Foster socio-dramatic play through peer interactions. Continue to explore insects and plants that we see in spring.
- Skills: role-play, peer interactions, cooperation, symbolic representation, social problem solving.

Blocks
- Materials: hollow wood blocks, until blocks, thin boards, wood shapes, and plastic insects.
- Rationale: Provide opportunities for creative play, creative building, and symbolic play while focusing on creating symmetrical structures.
- Skills: balance, spatial awareness, cooperative play, creative building, gross motor, social skills, symbolic representation.

Large Motor

Gym
- Materials: throw to the target, upside down rocking boats, big foam triangle, donut, rolling mountain, hurdles, stairs, big foam shapes, wobbly bridge, A-frame, empty boxes.
- Rationale: To encourage children planning and directional awareness. Engage in start to finish an obstacle course.
- Skills: hand-eye coordination, throwing, dynamic balance, core strength, balance and stability, jumping and landing, stepping up and down, coordination, body awareness, twisting, bending, fine motor, creative building and spatial awareness.
Playground
- Materials: shovels, buckets, bikes, wagons, swings 

- Rationale: The children have been enjoying digging and transporting the sand with the wagons, pulling the wagons around with their friends and riding the bikes. They are happy to run, swing, and dig while engaging in socio-dramatic play.
- Skills: cardio vascular, social skills, endurance, upper and lower body strength, balance and coordination.

Special Interest

Large Group

During large group we will be expand our discussion about Spring weather. We will create a weather journal for our classroom, so the children will be able to observe and track the weather through the remainder of the session. We will also learn about the plants and insects that are present in spring, we will discuss what they need to survive and why they bloom or come out of hibernation this time of year.

I hope you all have a great week!

Amanda

April 25th-29th
Kayla Lead Teaching

Overview:
This week's focus is on care giving and an appreciation of living things. Babies, animals, and plants are going to be a huge part of our lesson plan. We will be adding babies to our home living area in order to make a connection to the children's homes while they are at school. So many of our children have had new and exciting additions to their families. We are going to continue to explore the wonders of spring while utilizing the beautiful weather by taking small group nature walks on a regular basis and recording and documenting what we observe, paying close attention to the animals and plants that are living near the lab school. In addition, we will take small groups out of the playground area to observe the construction going on outside the lab school. We will be observing our bird feeders hanging from the window of our classroom, looking at the birds and animals and observing the ways that the animals eat. We will weave literacy and creativity into these various curriculum topics by bringing in books relating to our various curriculum areas, writing letters during large groups to important people in our lives, and practicing writing names and letters.

Expressive Arts


**Materials: different textured wallpaper, glue, buttons, pipe cleaners, plastic caps, bottle caps, and paint. Rationale: To express imagination to create a spring-inspired collage. To work on a project over a few days, so that the children will be able to see their creation as a process, and then to display the final product to beautify our classroom. To draw the children's attention to the ways in which nature changes to spring and to let the children express their interpretation of spring through the collage. To engage in a social art experience over a period of time. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

**Materials: light box, pattern blocks, felt plant/flower parts, books about plants/growing and felt board with the process of planting and growing of plants. Rationale: To promote creative expression and to reinforce the thinking through a new media. To explore plants and their growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: Letter-shaped cookie cutters, playdoh, rolling pins, and various playdoh tools. Rationale: To encourage children to think about springtime and growth in an unexpected area in the classroom via plant impressions on the dough. We will also be making the playdoh a variety of colors to encourage color mixing. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error (what amount of dough works for the best impression), problem-solving, symbolic representation, creative expression

**Materials: water, different species of turtles, small, medium, and large rocks, aquarium rocks, small fish, insects, tubes, nets, funnels, fish and turtle "food" and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and in the world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. To promote experimentation and problem solving around moving water from the water table into the funnels and tubes. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)

Science
**Materials: our pet turtles (Tuck and Rainbow), their tank, water changing materials, turtle food, and a cardboard box. Rationale: To build the children's caretaking awareness we will clean the tank as a class and take the turtles out of their habitat. The children will be able to explore the turtles (with caution) and observe them moving around the cardboard box. Children will be able to get hands-on experience of changing the water and cleaning the tank. Children will also be able to help with the feeding of the turtles on a weekly basis. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of the process of caretaking of pets and animals.

**Materials: Bird feeders, "observation log," photos of different species of birds that we might see (around window), green stairs for viewing the feeders. Rationale: In order to extend the bird feeder activity we did last week we will observe the feeders over the week to see what kind of animals are using them. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication., awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, avocado seeds, bulbs, various clear containers full of water, magnifying glasses, observation log. Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.

**Materials: seeds, clear plastic bags, paper towels. Rationale: To expand upon the children's interests from exploring the plants by observing seeds progressing through the germination process. Children will be able to observe the germination of the seed and then record the observations with assistance of a teacher. Skills: observation, explorations, communication, recording, hypothesis.

Outside/Science

**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Small groups could go out together and role-play the planting process on the playground during large group. Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

Dramatic Play


**Materials: Babies, cribs, high chairs, baby clothing, baby bottles, formula, and rattles. Rationale: To begin to introduce the topic of babis because of the new additions that many families have had or are having in the near future. Children will get a chance to live out their experiences at school and relate them to home. Skills: social skills, cooperative skills, collaboration, creative expression, and role-play.

**Materials: construction hats, dump trucks, cement trucks, hammer and nail replica toys, tool carrier, toy replica hammers, screw drivers, wrenches and saws, slide show of machines and how they work, pictures of bridges and other structural buildings. Rationale: To expand on a growing number of children's interests in "fixing" things and construction. To bring outside experiences with seeing various construction trucks or construction jobs going on in the community into the classroom and to explore how construction (and "fixing" things) works. Skills: creative expression, communication, role play, collaboration, problem solving

Math and Manipulatives
**Materials: Puzzles of flowers, tools, birds and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.

**Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).

**Materials: Small logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.

**Materials: Adult-baby matching puzzle. Rationale: To practice matching and explore the concept of animal babies.
Language and Literacy


**Materials: paper, envelopes, and pens. Rationale: In order to bring closure to the delivery area, we will create letters as a large group to mail or deliver to someone or something special. To explore the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. To continue to work on fundamentals of writing. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, plants, turtles and birds, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.

Blocks


**Materials: Blocks, steering wheels, "hubcaps", garbage trucks and recycling trucks, cement trucks, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, and road signs. Rationale: To expand off the children's growing interest in vehicles, we will encourage the children to use their imaginations to build their own vehicles and machines with the building materials. To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect.

Large Motor
**Materials: stairs, foam triangle and blue donut, platform, foam roller slide. Skills: upper and lower body strength, coordination, stability and balance, risk taking.

**Materials: stairs, bolsters, inverted monkey bars with swinging bridge. Skills: balance, coordination, stability, risk taking, core strength.

**Materials: A frame, "rope maze." Skills: static balance (twisting, bending, stretching), coordination, core strength.

**Materials: bean bags, target, cardboard boxes. Rationale: to build with an open-ended, large materials in a large, open space. To practice hand-eye coordination and throwing skills.

Large Group


This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, babies, and construction. We will read social stories, sing new songs, and model new activities in the room, such as caring for babies (changing a diaper).

Music/Movement


**Materials: songs brought in by families, piano, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snack
Monday - Pizza (prepared in class)
Wednesday - Animal crackers & milk
Thursday - Painted toast & milk

Kayla Lead Teaching

Overview:
 This week's focus is on the care giving and appreciation of living things. Babies, animals and plants are going to be a huge part of our lesson plan. We will be adding babies to our home living area in order to make a connection to the children's homes while they are at school. So many of our children have had new and exciting additions to their families. We are going to continue to explore the wonders of spring while utilizing the beautiful weather by taking small group nature walks on a regular basis and recording and documenting what we observe paying close attention to the animals and plants that are living near the lab school. In addition, we will take small groups out of the playground area to observe the construction going on outside the lab school. We will be observing our bird feeders hanging from the window of our classroom. We will be looking at the birds and animals that are using our feeders and observe the ways that the animals eat. We will weave literacy and creativity into these various curriculum topics by bringing in books relating to our various curriculum areas, writing letters during large groups to important people in our lives, and practicing writing names and letters. Andrea will be cooking with the children on Monday making English muffin pizzas.

Expressive Arts


**Materials: different textured wallpaper, glue, buttons, pipe cleaners, plastic caps, bottle caps, and paint. Rationale: To let the children express their imagination to create a spring inspired collage. To work on a project over a few days, so that the children will be able to see their creation as a process then to display the final product in our class. To draw the children's attention to the ways in which nature changes to spring and to let the children express their interpretation of spring through the collage. To engage in a social art experience over a period of time. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

**Materials: light box, artificial petals, stems, roots (parts of a flower/plant), books about plants/growing and felt board with the process of planting and growing of plants. Rationale: To promote creative expression and to reinforce the thinking through a new media. To explore plant and their growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: Letters cut-outs, playdoh, rolling pins, cookie cutters, and various playdoh tools. Rationale: To encourage experimentation with color mixing, we will be making the playdoh a variety of colors. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error, problem-solving, symbolic representation, creative expression

**Materials: water, different species of turtles (toy replicas), small, medium, and large rocks, aquarium rocks, small fish (toy replicas), insects (toy replicas), tubes, nets, funnels, fish and turtle food and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and in the world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. To promote experimentation and problem solving around moving water from the water table into the funnels and tubes. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)
Science

**Materials: our pet turtles (Tuck and Rainbow), their tank, water changing materials, turtle food, and a cardboard box. Rationale: To build the children's caretaking awareness we will clean the tank as a class and take the turtles out of their habitat. The children will be able to explore the turtles (with caution) and observe them moving around the cardboard box. Children will be able to get hands on experience of changing the water and cleaning the tank. Children will also be able to help with the feeding of the turtles on a weekly basis. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of the process of caretaking of pets and animals.

**Materials: Bird feeders, "observation log," photos of different species of birds that we might see (around window), green stairs for viewing the feeders. Rationale: In order to extend the bird feeder activity we did last week we will observe the feeders over the week to see what kind of animals are using the birdfeeders. To encourage observation of the birds and other animals eating the seeds off of the birdfeeders to made last week. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, avocado seeds, bulbs, various clear containers full of water, magnifying glasses, "observation log". Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.

**Materials: seeds, clear plastic bags, paper towels Rationale: To move the children's interests from exploring the plants. By having each child have an opportunity to have their own bag with a seed to watch germination process. Children will be able to observe the germination of the seed and then record the observations with assistance of a teacher. Skills: observation, explorations, communication, recording, hypothesis.

Outside/Science

**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, plant seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Small groups could go out together and role-play the planting process on the playgroup during large group. Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

**Materials: camera, clipboard and pen. Rationale: We will continue take small group nature walks to explore nature and to get a better understanding of the different signs of spring. Also, we will observe the construction that is going on around the lab school. To promote an awareness of nature and seasons. Skills: observation, hypothesis and predictions, recording, exploration and communication.

Dramatic Play


**Materials: Babies, cribs, high chairs, baby clothing, baby bottles, formula, and rattles. Rationale: To begin to introduce babies to the children because of the new additions that many families have had or are having in the near future. Children will get a chance to live out their experiences at school and relate them to home. Skills: social skills, cooperative skills, collaboration, creative expression, and role-play.

**Materials: construction hats, dump trucks, cement trucks, hammer and nail replica toys, tool carrier, toy replica hammers, screw drivers, wrenches and saws, slide show of machines and how they work, pictures of bridges and other structural buildings. Rationale: To expand on a growing number of children's interests in "fixing" things and construction. To bring outside experiences with seeing various construction trucks or construction jobs going on in the community into the classroom and to explore how construction (and "fixing" things) works. Skills: creative expression, communication, role play, collaboration, problem solving

Math and Manipulatives
**Materials: Puzzles of flowers, tools, birds and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.

**Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).

**Materials: Small logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: paper, envelopes, and pens. Rationale: To order to bring closure to the delivery area, we will create letters as a large group to someone or something important to mail or deliver our letters to that special someone/something. To explore the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. To continue to work on fundamentals of writing. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, plants, turtles and birds, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.
Blocks



**Materials: Blocks, steering wheels, symbolic hubcaps, garbage trucks and recycling trucks, cement trucks, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, and road signs. Rationale: To expand off the children's growing interest of vehicle we will encourage the children to use their imagine to build their own vehicles and machines with the building materials. To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect I will probably add something about small group visits to the building blocks in the gym.

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, foam roller slide with rope, climber with donut slide, climbing bars with slanted plank bridge in between. Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The foam roller slide provides a new challenge of using upper body strength to pull up and risk taking to slide down. The plank bridge challenges the children to use balance in order to walk from one end to the other. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, and physical risk taking.

Large Group


This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, babies, and construction. We will read social stories, sing new songs, and model new activities in the room, such as caring for a baby (changing a diaper).
Music/Movement



**Materials: songs brought in by families, piano, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snack:
Tuesday - Animal crackers & milk
Friday- Crackers & fruit

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Weekly Lesson Plan For Ross' Class
Week of: 4/18/11 -- 4/22/11
Lead Teaching This Week: Cara

Overview: This week is going to be a fun but busy week for the class: focusing a great deal of our attention on expanding our recent conversations with the children about responsibility and connecting those conversations to many activities throughout the room. This theme will be found in the dramatic play area as the children make decisions, and work together, to create their theater. It will also be found in the science area as we build off our previous conversations about caring for our plants. It will also be addressed as we move the guinea pigs out of the nook and into the classroom. Another exciting part of this week is the start of small groups! We expect to start them on Wednesday or Thursday (group themes and members coming later this week!).

Expressive Art (paint, collage, clay)
• Materials: Art table: various natural/ "beautiful" materials for creating bird nests (e.g. coffee filters for shaping, and paper shreds, lichen, and yarn), materials for creating masks or costumes (paper, feathers, bottle caps, markers, paper confetti, and more)
Clay table: Clay, wires, popsicle sticks, gems
• Rationale: The continued bird's nest exploration will take flight (pun intended) this week. The children will be invented to make their own nests using beautiful materials as they continue examining the real nest displayed at the table. We hope to expand and create realistic bird nests this upcoming week, using the materials above, and maybe even bringing some of the soil from the soil table over to create mud "just like the birds did."
At the clay table the children will continue to work on sculpting plants, and we will create an extension of our bird's nest project and focus on sculpting nests along with objects such as eggs and animals that live in nests.
• Skills: observations of the real world, fine motor, creativity, artistic expression, sensory exploration, opportunities for social interactions, generalizing (i.e. being able to understand and take the information that they have learned from the birds nest exploration at the art table and apply it to the clay table)

Sensory (Soil table)
• Materials: Planting soil, and shovels, hand rakes, rocks, twigs, insects
• Rationale: The water table with bubbles had its last day Friday, and the new soil table will be ready on Monday. With our expansion of our plant exploration, we thought this would be a great hands-on activity for the children. We will start with just the soil and the gardening tools, but as the week progresses, this activity could expand to exploration of the contents of soil; worms, bugs, and other critters that live in soil.
• Skills: social skills, generalizing, knowledge on the world around them, recalling prior knowledge of caring for other living things, symbolic representation

Math and Manipulative
• Materials: puzzles that highlight classroom topics (i.e. plants, seeds, birds, as well as more fractions), new games with rules (i.e. Snail's Pace), shape matching game Perfection, pre-/early-literacy game Boggle Jr., shape/spatial awareness game Blokus
• Rationale: We will continue our exploration of fractions, shapes, spatial planning, and looking at "how things come together" (one-to-one correspondence/part-to-whole relationships). We will also have the teachers facilitate some of the games at the table, asking questions, and helping the children use their skills of inquiry. Snail's Pace, a turn taking game lets the children race their "snails" as well as supporting developing executive function skills. Boggle Jr. works print recognition, and 1 to 1 correspondence.
• Skills: shape recognition/matching, spatial awareness, 1-to-1 correspondence, counting, numeral awareness, social skills, executive functioning (i.e. waiting of a turn/impulse control)

Science
• Materials: at the table: seedling pouches and planting pots, notebook, magnifying glass, water, crayons, markers
in the cave: multi link cubes for plant/flower making
• Rationale: The children will continue taking care and responsibility for their seedlings. This week the children will continue watching and caring for their sprouting seeds/beans, observing as they sprout and record the changes in their journals. They will also hypothesize about how their plant will look by drawing pictures that we will post on the wall next to the science table, then, we will have the children draw what they see when the pants do start to sprout.
• Skills: observation, scientific thinking and reasoning, hypothesis creating/testing, social skills, independence, symbolic representation.
The "Nook" (the room behind the art area)
• Materials: guinea pigs and all there supplies, projector, old tape rolls, wires, various objects around the classroom to experiment with shadows.
• Rationale: This week, we will be moving the guinea pigs into the classroom and we will be able to use the projector again. We hope to use the projector to cast light onto the window in the nook - casting a shadow on a curtain for some interactive shadow play.
• Skills: responsibility/pet-care skills, turn taking, following directions, recalling prior knowledge of caring for other living things, hypothesis creating/testing, artistic expression

Language and Literacy
• Materials: writing supplies (lined/unlined paper, markers, pencils, pens), props for making tickets and money, alphabet stamps, tape, stamps, stickers
• Rationale: With the continued excitement of the theatre play in the classroom we will utilize the writing center as a place to create play money, tickets, and programs for the shows. We will talk about this at large group to create an excitement and show the children what materials are available to use. The children will be able to personalize their creations. The teachers will also be there to help the children practice their pre-/early-literacy skills as well as continue to support writing skills.
• Skills: letter recognition and awareness, pre-/early-literacy skills, awareness of writing/concepts of print, fine-motor strength/coordination

Dramatic Play
• Materials: fabric, dress-up shoes, capes, keys, scarves, cell phones, play food/flatware, theatre props, costumes
• Rationale: Since the field trip to the Children's Theatre, the children have actively been working to create their own theatre. The excitement is there and Thursday and Friday of last week we started the "construction" on the theater. The information gained from the field trip helped the children include multiple areas: a stage, costume making are, "dressing rooms," and prop/set design area. This new arrangement and the children's involvement in the creation will instill responsibility for their area and all will create exciting and new dramatic play opportunities.
• Skills: social skills, cooperative skills, creativity, storytelling skills, discussion and problem solving, planning and brainstorming

Blocks
• Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, peg people, long/short planks, wood cubes
• Rationale: This week we hope to use part of our block area as our stage for theater using the hollow blocks as our stage. We hope to see use of the smaller blocks as props to extend and expand on the use of the smaller blocks by using the area as our "prop shop" and really utilizing the children's representational thought.
• Skills: large-motor strength and coordination, fine-motor skills, social skills (including collaboration, communicating, and negotiating), creativity, symbolic representation, concepts of balance and stability

Large Motor
• Materials: in the gym: rolling mountain, monkey bars, inclined balance beam, donut slide with triangle attached "ice mountain"
on the playground: tricycles, buckets, shovels, sticks, pinecones, climber, big monkey bars
• Rationale: This week we will be continuing our gym play by using all of the equipment and also playing our own games, the student teachers have been coming in with new ideas for more organized group gym games to play also. The outdoors were beautiful last week and the children enjoyed every second that had outdoors. We hope that the beautiful weather will continue so that we can spend even more time, play and nature exploration outside.
• Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Special Interest/Announcements
• Only a few more spots for summer school as well as for the science camp! Send in your enrollment soon to make sure you get on the list!
• Thanks to Gaio for joining us last week and playing guitar at Friday's large group! The involvement of the families has been great and we'll have another guest(s) for this Friday.
• Small groups will be starting this week. They'll all be revolving around "things around our school." We're excited about the topics and will send out an update when the groups have been finalized.
• With the hopes of warmer weather coming soon, we will start spending more time outside, both at the end of the day as well as possibly during free-play. Some days may be "NO GYM" days, giving us more time to be outside!

Snack
Monday: Pineapple chunks and wheat crackers
Tuesday: Rice cakes
Wednesday: Orange slices and pretzels
Thursday: Cucumber slices and crackers
Friday: Salad
* All snacks served with milk and water unless otherwise noted *

Overview: This week in our classroom we will be continuing our two large themes of seeds and restaurants. We are adding dirt to our sensory table for the children to explore and manipulate. We will also be taking a field trip to Duffy's Pizza in Dinkytown to get ideas on how to expand our dramatic play area and to show the children what kinds of duties are performed at a real pizza restaurant. We will also be bringing the guinea pigs out of the nook area and into the main part of our classroom. We plan to continue to provide the children with facts about the guinea pigs and to teach them the proper ways to interact with our new pets.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: Blokus, Boggle Jr., crayons and notepad for Boggle word writing, Perfection, interlocking puzzles, construction floor puzzling, interlocking food puzzles, shape/fraction puzzles
•Rationale: To introduce children to games with rules that relate to print awareness, numeral recognition, and knowledge of shape. To introduce children to simple ways to identify and describe shapes and to create new shapes from smaller shapes. To introduce children to our upcoming restaurant in the dramatic play area we have food puzzle for the children to work with. The construction floor puzzle was a preferred choice last week so we will continue to have it out and encourage the children to work together to put it together.
•Skills: print awareness, part-whole relationships, shape recognition and matching, shape combination, spatial awareness, one-to-one correspondence, turn-taking, social skills.
Expressive Arts (paint, clay)
•Materials: primary color paint at the easel, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, natural collage materials, watercolors, brushes, spray bottles, textured watercolor paper, bubble wrap
•Rationale: to explore new tools and media with hands and eyes, promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships and communication skills as children work on collaborative and individual projects. We added the bubble wrap this week to concentrate more on texture and allow the children to explore what patterns they can make with different objects.
•Skills: creativity, artistic expression, fine motor development (strength, coordination), sharing ideas and materials, symbolic representation, color recognition
•Materials: Clay, hammers, clay knives, craft sticks, pencils, toothpicks, rolling pins
•Rationale: to promote sensory awareness and provide both a creative and social opportunity for children as they increase their fine motor skills. To begin representing ideas and objects in a 3-D medium. Additionally, the children can begin saving their clay creations, working on them for several days, and drying them out to create a permanent art object. The students can begin to create pizzas with the clay to expand on our restaurant dramatic play theme.
•Skills: sensory input, symbolic representation, observation, sharing materials, and fine motor development (strength, coordination)
Sensory
•Materials: dirt, bugs, sticks
•Rationale: to allow and encourage experimentation with dirt and the natural objects one might find in dirt. We have been doing a lot of reading and discussing about planting and have actually planted some seeds in dirt. The sensory table will give children the opportunity to see what else we can do with dirt. During the week we will brainstorm ideas with the children about what else we could add to the dirt.
•Skills: sensory input/developing an awareness of senses, observation of physical changes, creative thinking, fine motor, knowledge of physical properties/cause and effect, comparison, symbolic representation, sharing materials
Dramatic Play
Restaurant
•Materials: Restaurant center props (aprons, chef hats, cardboard pizza boxes, felt food, dishes), housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), writing supplies (menus, paper, pencils, markers) dress-up fabric, shoes, accessories such as keys, cell phones, necklaces, and purses, cash register, money
•Rationale: A new center to facilitate and strengthen dramatic play related to working at and visiting a restaurant. To follow the children's continued interest with delivering packages, pizza boxes will be included for delivery of pizzas. To encourage cooperative play and highlight another job, pizza deliver/waiter in our community and what it takes to perform that job. To introduce how to make sales and how to be polite when communicating with a customer.
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, peer interaction, turn taking, social problem solving, symbolic representation, literacy
Housekeeping Area
•Materials: baby dolls, doll clothes, bottles, strollers, kitchen supplies, dress up clothes
•Rationale: Since some of the children in our class were really interested in washing babies in our sensory table last week, we plan to move the babies over to the house keeping area. This way the children can practice taking care of babies and doing tasks such as feeding, clothing, and rocking the babies.
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, peer interaction, turn taking, social problem solving
Language and Literacy
Writing Center
•Materials: menus, food order forms, paper, alphabet stamps, a variety of writing utensils, scissors
•Rationale: to promote print and letter awareness while incorporating dramatic play with the menus and food order forms. We are going to spend more time encouraging children to use the menus to show the waiters and waitresses what they actually would like to buy at the restaurant.
•Skills: awareness of print, connecting speech to print and print to speech, letter recognition, pre-writing, receptive language, fine motor, creative expression, social interaction, awareness of others, community building
Library
•Materials: Books about seeds, spring, and babies. Books about restaurants, pizza, and other types of food have also been added.
•Rationale: to support pre-literacy skills, to familiarize children with new books, and to allow for quiet time in the classroom, to use books as resources for non-fiction information, to give the children ideas about other objects we could include in our dramatic play area and in our sensory table.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, awareness of print, listening, community building
Science
Table
Materials: Magnifying glasses, flowers, paper, pencils, markers, measuring tools (rulers and tape measurers), dirt, pots, seeds, water
Rationale: Magnifying glasses enable the children to examine the flower growing in our classroom and notice changes in the flower as it grows. We have been doing a lot of talking about seeds and plants growing. This activity will give the students a chance to see a plant that is in the process of growing. We are adding the measuring tools so the students can measure how much the plant grows. Also, planting new seeds allows children to connect the previously explored seeds to the plants they grow into. The children will be able to practice watering the plants and discussing what plants need to grow.
Skills: Exploration, fine motor, drawing, measuring, language
Caves:
Materials: Colored linking blocks, paper, markers, Legos
Rationale: In the caves we have been letting the children explore with the colored linking blocks. The children have shown interest in created flowers, trees, and gardens. This week we are going to encourage them to continue to make flowers and begin to talk about patterns. As teachers make patterns with the blocks and describe patterns, children will be able to explore with the blocks to create patterns of their own. The Legos will give the children another tool to create flowers with. The children can compare and contrast the flowers made out of Legos and the flowers made out of linking blocks.
Skills: Fine motor, pattern constructing, memory expansion, color recognition, cooperation, planning skills, language, comparing
Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, multi-colored shape blocks, small wooden cube blocks, small wooden rods, steering wheels, paper and pencils, easel, truck books
•Rationale: To foster current dramatic play themes, to encourage planful and purposeful approaches to building including drawing or writing plans and blueprints, to combine different materials in order to create new structures, to allow for individual building and collaborative work. The children can use the truck books to create delivery trucks for our restaurant. This will tie together the block area and the dramatic play areas to create a more social, collaborative classroom.
•Skills: large motor development, dramatic play, creating imaginary scenarios, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking
Large Motor
Gym
Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with wedge slide, A-frame with ladder bridge
, rolling climber/slide, rocking seat
•Rationale: to provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges.
 The rolling climber (purchased with our Gym Jam money) allows children to use upper- and lower-body strength as they climb on an unstable surface. It also encourages appropriate risk-taking as they slide down when they are finished. The donut slide was changed to a wedge slide to give the children an opportunity to try and climb up the wedge while using their arm strength to pull on a rope for additional support.
•Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills * Look for additions later in the week!
Playground
•Materials: shovels, scoops, buckets, dishes for dramatic play, rakes, tricycles, and wagons
•Rationale: The melted snow has revealed plenty of sand, leaves, grass for the children to explore. Digging in wet sand, raking leaves, and riding trikes around the playground create opportunities for social interaction, cooperation, role play, and lots of large motor experiences.
•Skills: upper and lower body strength, physical fitness, perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness), building community through social interactions.
Special Interest
•This week, our very capable student teachers will begin leading large groups and initiating our classroom transitions.
•Fieldtrip to Duffy's Dinkytown Pizza on Wednesday.
Snack
Monday - Pretzels
Wednesday - Pizza at Duffy's
Thursday - Hummus and carrots
*** All snacks are served with milk and water unless otherwise noted

Spring Lesson Plan 4.18-4.22
April 18th-22nd
Andrea Lead Teaching

Overview

Our goal this week is to build on the new areas that were added to the classroom last week (delivery area, plant area, and turtle/animal caretaking area). We also are going to dive deeper into exploring the wonders of spring while utilizing the hopefully beautiful weather by taking small group nature walks on a regular basis and recording and documenting what we observe. To expand on the interest in spring animals further, we will be doing a cooking project creating bird feeders with sun butter (no peanuts) and hanging them outside our classroom windows so the children are able to observe the visiting birds. We will weave literacy and creativity into these various curriculum topics by bringing in books relating to our various curriculum areas, maps in the delivery and block area, and writing paper in the delivery area for the children to practice writing their names and letters to their classmates and teachers. We will also be starting our small groups this week!

Expressive Arts

**Materials: one of the large tree branches hanging in our classroom, green ribbon, green tissue paper, green cellophane, glue, other green materials that we are able to add to the tree branch to make it more "spring like". Rationale: To bring the interest of the seasons change in to the classroom. To draw the children's attention to the ways in which nature changes from winter to spring. To engage in a social art experience. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

**Materials: light box, artificial petals, stems, roots (parts of a flower/plant), books about plants/growing. Rationale: To promote creative expression and begin the process of thinking about plants and growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: hard plastic shapes that leave leaf and flower-like impressions, playdoh, rolling pins, cookie cutters, and various playdoh tools. Rationale: To encourage children to think about springtime and growth in an unexpected area in the classroom via plant impressions on the dough. We will also be making the playdoh a variety of colors to encourage color mixing. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error (what amount of dough works for the best impression), problem-solving, symbolic representation, creative expression

**Materials: water, different species of turtles (toy replicas), small, medium, and large rocks, aquarium rocks, small fish (toy replicas), tubes, nets, funnels, and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and in the world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. To promote experimentation and problem solving around creating fountains with tubes and funnels. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)

Science

**Materials: Pinecones, sunbutter (peanut free), bird seed, string, log record of the kinds of birds coming to the bird feeders. Rationale: To promote exploration of the world around us and to observe the birds eating from the feeders near the lab school. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, various clear containers full of water, "observation log". Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.

Outside/Science
**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, plant seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

**Materials: camera, clipboard and pen. Rationale: We will take small group nature walks to explore nature and to get a better understanding of the different signs of spring. To promote an awareness of nature and seasons. Skills: observation, hypothesis and predictions, recording, exploration and communication.

Dramatic Play

**Materials: mail carrier dress up, packages, scales to weigh the various packages, computer paper folded into a tri-fold, newspapers, recycled computer paper, books about mail and delivery jobs, clipboards to map out route, steering wheels, and postage. Rationale: To begin to explore specific delivery jobs in response to the interest in the garbage and recycling trucks in the block area and the recent delivery by the FedEx truck on the playground. Using simple maps to draw and "plan out" a route for delivering the mail. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play
Along with the delivery theme, we have also added a construction area to the dramatic play center.

**Materials: construction hats, construction-themed picture slideshow on the computer, dump trucks, hammer and nail replica toys, tool carrier, toy replica hammers, screw drivers, wrenches and saws. Rationale: To expand on a growing number of children's interests in "fixing" things and construction. To bring outside experiences with seeing various construction trucks or construction jobs going on in the community into the classroom and to explore how construction (and "fixing" things) works. Skills: creative expression, communication, role play, collaboration, problem solving

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: balancing scales, packages (various weights of packages) Rationale: To expand on children's interest in heavy vs. light as well as in big, bigger, biggest and small, smaller, smallest. To introduce scales and how to read them to explain various math concepts (i.e., this package is heavier than this one) Skills: sorting, classification, comparison, weight

**Materials: Puzzles of delivery trucks/construction themed trucks, tools, pet animals, and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.

**Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).

**Materials: Small logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.

**Materials: Fraction puzzle. Rationale: To explore the concepts of whole, half, thirds, and fourths.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: shipping "invoices," clipboards, pens. Recycling and mail related symbols, and computer paper with writing utensils in the delivery area. Recording implements for scientific observations. Rationale: To bring awareness to the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. To continue to work on fundamentals of writing. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, delivery, plants, turtles and other animals, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.

Blocks

**Materials: Blocks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, cement trucks, blue trucks with FedEx symbol, gas pumps, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, road signs, and small symbolic "people" figures. Rationale: To expand off the children's growing interest in the garbage trucks (which were the first trucks placed in the block area) and to introduce other various delivery trucks. To explore symbols and their meaning (i.e. the FedEx symbol, recycling symbol etc.) To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, foam roller slide with rope, climber with donut slide, climbing bars with slanted plank bridge in between. Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The foam roller slide provides a new challenge of using upper body strength to pull up and risk taking to slide down. The plank bridge challenges the children to use balance in order to walk from one end to the other. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking.

Large Group

This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, delivery, and construction. We will read social stories, sing new songs, and model new activities in the room, such as the new branch decorating art activity in the art area or the delivery dramatic play.

Music/Movement

**Materials: songs brought in by families, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snacks:
Monday - Applesauce & graham crackers
Tuesday - Pretzels & milk
Wednesday - Pretzels & milk
Thursday - Cucumber slices & crackers
Friday - Cucumber slices & crackers

Andrea Beebe Lead Teaching

Overview

Our goals this week are to build on the new areas that were added to the classroom last week (delivery area, plant area and turtle/animal caretaking area). We also are going to dive deeper into exploring the wonders of spring life while utilizing the hopefully beautiful weather by taking small group nature walks on a regular basis and recording/documenting what we observe. To expand on the interest of spring animals/spring theme further, we will be doing a cooking project creating bird feeders with sun butter (no peanuts) and hanging them outside our classroom windows so the children are able to observe them while in the classroom. Our goal is to also weave literacy and creativity into these various curriculum topics by adding books throughout the classroom relating to our various curriculum areas, maps in the delivery and block area, along with computer paper in the delivery area for the children to practice writing their name or writing letters in general. We will also be starting our small groups this week!

Expressive Arts

**Materials: one of the large tree branches hanging in our classroom, green ribbon, green tissue paper, green cellophane, glue, other green materials that we are able to add to the tree branch to make it more "spring like". Rationale: To bring the interest of the seasons change in to the classroom. To draw the children's attention to the ways in which nature changes from winter to spring. To engage in a social art experience. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

**Materials: light box, artificial petals, stems, roots (parts of a flower/plant), books about plants/growing. Rationale: To promote creative expression and begin the process of thinking about plants and growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: hard plastic shapes that leave leaf and flower like impressions on the playdoh, playdough, rolling pins, cookie cutters, and various playdoh tools. Rationale: To encourage children to think about springtime and growth in an unexpected area in the classroom via plant impressions on the dough. We will also be making the playdoh a variety of colors to encourage color mixing. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error (what amount of dough works for the best impression), problem-solving, symbolic representation, creative expression

**Materials: water, different species of turtles (toy replicas), small medium and large rocks, aquarium rocks, small fish (toy replicas), tubes, nets, funnels, and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. To promote experimentation and problem solving around creating fountains with tubes and funnels. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)

Science

**Materials: Pinecones, sunbutter (peanut free), bird seed, string, log record of the kinds of birds coming to the bird feeders. Rationale: To promote exploration of the world around us and to observe the birds eating from the feeders near the lab school. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, various clear containers full of water, "observation log". Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.
Outside/Science

**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, plant seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

**Materials: camera, clipboard and pen. Rationale: Small group nature walks to explore nature and to get a better understanding of the different signs in our world that mean spring is coming. To promote an awareness of nature and seasons. Skills: observation, hypothesis and predictions, recording, exploration and communication.

Dramatic Play

**Materials: mail carrier dress up, packages, scales to weigh the various packages, computer paper folded into a tri-fold, newspapers, recycled computer paper, books about mail and delivery jobs, clipboards to map out route, steering wheels, and postage. Rationale: To begin to explore a specific delivery jobs in response to the interest in the garbage and recycling trucks in the block area and the recent delivery by the FedEx truck on the playground. Using simple maps to draw and "plan out" a route for delivering the mail. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play
Along with the delivery theme, we have also added a construction area to the dramatic play center. Materials: construction hats, construction themed picture slideshow on the computer, dump trucks, hammer and nail replica toys, tool carrier, toy replica hammers, screw drivers, wrenches and saws. Rationale: To expand on a growing number of children's interests in "fixing" things and construction. To bring outside experiences with seeing various construction trucks or construction jobs going on in the community into the classroom and exploring how construction (and "fixing" things) works. Skills: creative expression, communication, role play, collaboration, problem solving

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: balancing scales, packages (various weights of packages) Rationale: To expand on children's interest in heavy vs. light as well as big, bigger, biggest and small, smaller, smallest. To introduce scales and how to read them to explain various math concepts (i.e., this package is heavier than this one) Skills: sorting, classification, comparison, weight

**Materials: Puzzles of delivery trucks/construction themed trucks, tools, pet animals and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.
**Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).
**Materials: Small logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.
**Materials: Fraction puzzle. Rationale: To explore the concepts of whole, half, thirds, and fourths.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: shipping "invoices," clipboards, pens. Recycling and mail related symbols, and computer paper with writing utensils in the delivery area. Recording implements for scientific observations. Rationale: To bring awareness to the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. To continue to work on fundamentals of writing. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, delivery, plants, turtles and other animals, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.

Blocks

**Materials: Blocks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, cement trucks, blue trucks with FedEx symbol, gas pumps, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, road signs, and small symbolic "people" figures. Rationale: To expand off the children's growing interest in the garbage trucks (which were the first trucks placed in the block area) and to introduce other various delivery trucks. To explore symbols and their meaning (i.e. the FedEx symbol, recycling symbol etc.) To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, foam roller slide with rope, climber with donut slide, climbing bars with slanted plank bridge in between. Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The foam roller slide provides a new challenge of using upper body strength to pull up and risk taking to slide down. The plank bridge challenges the children to use balance in order to walk from one end to the other. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking.

Large Group

This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, delivery, and construction. We will read social stories, sing new songs, and model new activities in the room, such as the new branch decorating art activity in the art area or the delivery dramatic play.

Music/Movement

**Materials: songs brought in by families, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snacks:

Tuesday - Pretzels & milk

Friday- Cucumber slices & crackers

Overview:
This week we will continue to develop the curriculum topics planned for the spring. The children have been very interested in tracking the weather, finding insects and examining and sorting seeds. The children are encouraged to use all of their senses as well as thermometers to gather information about the weather before recording information on a calendar and simple graph. We will continue to search for insects and introduce new vocabulary for labeling parts and behavior as we examine them further. We will extend the children's experiences with plants by having each child plant, and learn to care for, his/her own seed. We will also continue to build on the concepts of line and symmetry by helping the children search for symmetry in the natural world and use line to represent their ideas and observations.

Expressive Arts:
Materials: markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, tape, glue, paper
Rationale: To enhance the children's observation skills by encouraging them to use lines as a way to represent plant and insect specimens as well as collect data.
Skills: creative-expression, fine motor skills, hand eye coordination, self- expression

Sensory:
Materials: sand table, plastic frogs, insects, snakes, and lizards
Rationale: To provide and opportunity to engage in small group interaction as they represent the way that frogs and lizards come out of their mud holes as a result of spring arriving. This activity also promotes learning about building homes for the frogs, snakes, and lizards as well as learning about how they move and what they eat.
Skills: creative expression, symbolic play, physical properties, sensory stimulation

Science:
Materials: seed sorting activity on the light table, identifying different types of insects, and bringing in any insects we find outside into the classroom. Weather calendar and graph. Tadpole and fish for observation. Paper, clipboards, markers, etc.
Rationale: As we enter into the spring season having these types of activities will help build collective awareness as the children learn about seeds, insects, and the spring season. They will be able to ask questions, share what they know about the materials, and become more observant. Children will have the opportunity to observe and record the growth of the seeds once they are planted this week and also record the weather each day.
Skills: observation skills, expressing thought, learning facts, recording skills, critical thinking, sorting, and making comparisons.

Language and Literacy:
Materials: magnetic letters and pictures of objects beginning with each letter of the alphabet, pencils, paper, tape, mailboxes with the children's names, envelopes, new books about insects and plants, and stories on tape in the loft.
Rationale: The magnetic letters and pictures will allow children to learn more about letter sounds as they search for objects that begin with each letter. Those who are more familiar with letters and letter sounds will be encouraged to combine letters and blend sounds to form words.
Skills: Fine motor skills, letter recognition, creative expression, and communication through writing/ dictation.

Math and Manipulatives:
Materials: interlocking puzzles, mosaic buttons for working with symmetry, spring bingo, sunken garden symmetry activity
Rationale: The children will have the opportunity to add the flowers to a symmetrical template of the sunken garden they saw at the Como Conservatory. To add depth to the children's understanding of symmetry we will introduce new axes of symmetry (i.e. diagonal, horizontal) to challenge their thinking. The spring bingo game will provide opportunities to work on matching skills as well as following directions.
Skills: matching, symmetry, patterns, games with rules, problem solving

Dramatic Play:
Materials: frog and bird costumes, kitchen set, woodland animals in the cave, flowers.
Rationale: We will be adding flowers to the dramatic play center to promote opportunities for the children to express what they know about our spring and plant curriculum topics.
Skills: creative expression, social problem solving, self-expression, group cooperation, listening skills, language development

Blocks:
Materials: hollow blocks, unit blocks, insects, cove molding, small wood shapes
Rationale: The insects were added to the unit blocks to help inspire children to build homes for, and act out what they have learned about insect behavior.
Skills: large motor skills, creative expression, group corporation, listening skills, problem solving, symbolic representation, manual dexterity

Large Motor Gym:
Materials: monkey bars, rolling slide, notch blocks, cushioned "rock", doughnut with slide, A-frame with an angled bridge between
Rationale: The new rolling slide has been a challenge embraced by the children as they use all their muscles and motor planning in order to reach the top. The new angled bridge that joins the two a frame ladders promotes balance as well as coordination.
Skills: large gross motor skills, balance, core-strength, coordination, climbing, grasping, risk taking, spatial awareness, depth perception.

Playground:
Materials: Shovels, rakes, trikes, wheel burrows, side walk chalk
Rationale: Now that spring is here children can use their large motor skills to pedal the trikes and pump on the swings. Bringing out the chalk has also created new forms of play like drawing lines to be used as a race track or road. Many of the children are digging in the sand and soil, which helps strengthen their core muscles and upper body.
Skills: cardiovascular endurance, large motor skills, problem solving, group coordination, balance, social skills.

Snack:
Monday: Blueberry Pancakes
Tuesday: Carrots and Pretzels
Wednesday: Rice cakes and Milk
Thursday: Cucumber slices and Crackers
Friday: Salad

Overview
Now that spring is upon us the classroom is full of fun and exciting springtime activities. We will continue to incorporate symmetry and lines throughout the week and use what we saw and heard at the Conservatory to enrich our experiences in the classroom. We will continue to discuss, explore, and provoke children's questions regarding seeds and spring. Seeds were introduced last week and this week we will plant our own and keep track of our plants' growth. We are planning on starting small groups on Thursday; stay tuned for more details.

Expressive Arts
-Materials: various seeds, flowers, thick and thin markers, colored pencils, crayons, tape, glue, staplers, paper punchers, construction paper.
-Rationale: To continue to work on children's understanding of lines and symmetry. Provide opportunities for children to create their own shapes and symmetrical designs.
-Skills: exploration of seeds and symmetry, observation, fine motor strength and control, self-expression.

Sensory
-Materials: individual trays with sand, frogs, lizards, and snakes.
-Rationale: To connect with our topic of life cycles and provide opportunities for social interaction and sensory manipulation.
-Skills: sensory stimulation, free exploration with sand, symbolic play, social interactions.

Science
-Materials: variety of seeds to plant, variety of seeds on the light table, soil, paint, vegetable oil, photos of insects and plants, magnifying glasses, tweezers, clipboards, fish, mealworms, tadpole.
-Rationale: To encourage children's observation and examination of different kinds of seeds; how they grow, what they need and how they look like after they begin to grow. To deepen our understanding of life cycles. Understand the concept of pollution and how it affects plant growth.
-Skills: scientific inquiry, observation, comparison, reasoning, investigation of the natural world and exploration, peer interactions, sorting, descriptive language, self-expression (journal entries).

Language and Literacy
-Materials: books about spring, flowers, insects and plants. Pens, pencils, markers, staplers, tape, paper, envelopes, and stencils. Magnetic boards with magnetic letters, and journals.
-Rationale: We continue to focus on print awareness and incorporation of the concept of symmetry by exploring alphabet letters that show symmetry as well as words that display this quality. We will continue to encourage talking, writing, and using books as informational resources. The children will use their journals to record how their plants are growing.
-Skills: awareness of print, awareness of print that displays symmetry, self-expression through talking, writing, drawing, awareness of the purpose of print and letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and connecting speech to print and print to speech, fine motor, vocabulary, social interactions, observing and recording.

Math and Manipulatives
-Materials: rulers, journals, a variety of interlocking puzzles, pattern mosaics, button mosaics.
-Rationale: To continue providing opportunities of symmetry exploration. Measuring and graphing plant growth.
-Skills: geometry, symmetry, patterns, reasoning, observation, classification, comparison, matching, logical thinking.

Dramatic Play
-Materials: back of the classroom: kitchen with dishes, flowers, fruits and veggies. In the symbolic play cave we have an assortment of stuffed owls and squirrels, plastic woodland animals, frogs and turtles, wood piece and small pieces of cloth.
-Rationale: Continue to explore spring and offer opportunities for social interactions and socio-dramatic play. Connection between the flowers we saw at the Conservatory and growth in our classroom.
-Skills: role-play, peer interactions, social problem solving, cooperation, symbolic representation.

Blocks
-Materials: hollow blocks, unit blocks, thin boards, clipboards, and additional wood shapes.
-Rationale: To provide opportunities for creative play in general and creative building in particular. We continue to focus on symmetry. 


-Skills: creative building, spatial awareness, symmetry, large motor skills, balance, directional awareness, symbolic representation, and social interaction skills.

Large Motor
Gym
-Materials: wall ladders, half circle foam balance piece, monkey bars, A-frame with ladder bridge, climber with donut slide.
-Rationale: To provide climbing opportunities as well as risk taking. Work on balancing and agility.
-Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk, core strength and balance.
Playground
-Materials: shovels, buckets, bikes, wagons
-Rationale: The children have been enjoying the wagons and taking-turns pulling their friends. They are happy to run, swing, and climb the monkey bars while engaging in socio-dramatic play.
-Skills: cardio vascular, endurance, upper and lower body strength, balance, movement through space, social skills.

Special Interest
Large Group
During large group we will be demonstrating how to plant seeds. We will also be doing an activity that illustrates polluted soil. The children will be able to observe the different soil and discuss the differences in plant growth among natural soil and polluted soil.
Parents

We would love to have parents bring in fresh flowers to display around the classroom. We will also use the flowers for multiple art activities.

Have a great week!

Courtney

H: "Look, it's a worm."

Context: H and A have noticed nests in the trees during the last week. The teachers put some bird nests on the art table with a collection of natural materials and the children spend a large portion of the morning examining the nests, making their own nests and talking about birds. Later, Frances (T) comes out on the playground to look for the nests in the trees with them.

H and A were digging around the base of a bush at the front of the playground in the shade.

H:"We're digging to plant our tomatoes."

H:"Look, it's a worm"

Teacher: "the first worm of spring, that's another sign of spring."
A: "No, it's not the first one we found."

H: "Let's put him in the wheelbarrow." (on top of the pile of dirt they had dug.)

H: "I know he's alive because he's moving."

A: "I don't know if it's a boy or a girl."

H: "they don't have any arms or legs"

T: "I wonder if it will dig a new tunnel?"

H: (Miming with her body,) "it just has to squeeze down into the dirt."

A: (observing as the worm stretches to become longer) "He stretches into the hole."

A: "Why do they like the dirt so much?"

H: "if they get too dry their skin dries out."

T: "I'm getting a little chilly - I might want to go out into the sunshine, should we look for birds' nests?"

A: "okay, just a little bit."

We look at the big oak in the middle of playground (with rope hanging) no nests seen.
Teacher spies one in tree over climbing equipment. "Look - there's one."

H: "There's another one over there."

Na and No come by - join group and move nearer to nest tree - we eventually find four nests. H and A have gone back to digging, but No and Na are interested enough to continue looking.

We go over to grove area to see if there are more nests there. No spies one in tree - N: "That's a squirrel nest!" She sees a small birds' nest on ground.

N: "This one fell out of the tree"

T: "Maybe because the wind was so strong yesterday."

N: "look, it has a hole in it"

T: "do you think it's from last year or from this spring?"

Na: "I think it's old."

No: "Let's show it to everybody!" -

They bring the nest to show Jocelyn. Ad becomes interested.

They return back to the place where they found it. They place the nest on the ground:

Ad: "Should we get some leaves?"

No: "Yeah, I'll get some." (she and Na go off for leaves) Ad: "and get some mud."

Ad: The leaves will be a nice soft....."

-- A student teacher calls clean up. Teacher asks "should we bring the nest into the classroom or leave it out here in a special place?"

all: "let's bring it in."

The nest is shown to a few more children (including A and H while waiting.) No: "This is NOT a nest from the classroom, we found it outside."

L and M working on one of the projects for the Spring Soiree.

J and A helping with the collage for the Soiree.

S and M using glue to attach collage objects to the "record mirror project."

Student Teachers Co-Lead Teaching

Overview

Our goals this week are to build on some unexpected "rich moments" which occurred last week (the delivery of a package from the Fed Ex truck and the sighting of wild turkeys in our playground), focusing on extensions of this material. We also hope to begin exploring the magic of new life sprouting by studying plants and the growth process.

Expressive Arts

**Materials: butcher paper, markers and crayons, large stencils. Rationale: To practice fine motor skill of following an outline. To engage in a social art experience. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, writing grasp, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

Cave
**Materials: light box, artificial petals, stems, roots (parts of a flower/plant), books about plants/growing. Rationale: To promote creative expression and begin the process of thinking about plants and growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: hard plastic shapes that leave leaf and flower like impressions on the playdough, playdough, rolling pins, cookie cutters, and various playdough tools. Rationale: To encourage children to think about springtime and growth in an unexpected area in the classroom via plant impressions on the dough. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error (what amount of dough works for the best impression), problem-solving, symbolic representation

**Materials: water, different species of turtles (toy replicas), rocks, and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)

Science

**Materials: Pinecones, sunbutter (peanut free), bird seed, string, log record of the kinds of birds coming to the bird feeders. Rationale: To promote exploration of the world around us and to observe the birds eating from the feeders near the lab school. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, various clear containers full of water, "observation log." Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.

Outside/Science
**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, plant seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

We will also be going on nature walks to explore the animals that live near the lab school. Last week we saw wild turkeys through the gym windows and on our playground.
**Materials: camera, clipboard and pen. Rationale: To explore nature and to get a better understanding of wild animals. To promote an awareness of nature and animal habitats. Skills: observation, hypothesis and predictions, recording, exploration and communication.

Dramatic Play

**Materials: mail carrier dress up, packages, scales to weigh the various packages, books about mail and delivery jobs, clipboards to map out route, steering wheels, and postage. Rationale: To begin to explore a specific delivery jobs in response to the interest in the garbage and recycling trucks in the block area and the recent delivery by the FedEx truck on the playground. Using simple maps to draw and "plan out" a route for delivering the mail. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: balancing scales, packages (various weights of packages) Rationale: To expand on children's interest in heavy vs. light as well as big, bigger, biggest and small, smaller, smallest. To introduce scales and how to read them to explain various math concepts (i.e., this package is heavier than this one) Skills: sorting, classification, comparison, weight

Language and Literacy

**Materials: shipping "invoices," clipboards, pens. Recycling and mail related symbols. Recording implements for scientific observations. Rationale: To bring awareness to the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, plants, turtles and other animals, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.

Blocks

**Materials: Blocks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, cement trucks, blue trucks with FedEx symbol, gas pumps, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, small wooden cars, road signs, and small symbolic "people" figures. Rationale: To expand off the growing interest in the garbage trucks and to introduce other various delivery trucks. To explore symbols and their meaning (i.e. the FedEx symbol, recycling symbol etc.) To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, foam roller slide with rope, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge. Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The foam roller slide provides a new challenge of using upper body strength to pull up and risk taking to slide down. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking.

Large Group

This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, construction. We will read social stories about recent exciting events, such as the turkeys or the Fed Ex delivery and model new activities in the room, such as the "flower making" activity in the cave or the delivery dramatic play.

Music/Movement

**Materials: songs brought in by families, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snacks:
Tuesday - Animal crackers & milk
Friday- Pasta & sauce

Overview
This week we will be focusing on building collective awareness of the curriculum topics of spring, plants, and insects. To kick-off our exploration of spring, the children helped write new words to the "winter song" in order to reflect what they know about seasonal cycles. They will now begin charting weather patterns and temperatures in order to track patterns and change over time. The children's knowledge of the wide variety of plants will be enhanced by the field trip to the Como Conservatory this week. In the classroom we will start investigating seeds and discuss plant care in order to build up to a re-examination plant life-cycles. The children have already begun finding insects and worms on playground. We will emphasize respect for all life as we carefully examine these living creatures and wonder about their roles in nature.

Expressive Arts
-Materials: thin and thick markers, crayons, colored pencils, tape, staplers, glue sticks, scissors, paper punchers and construction paper
-Rationale: We will use lines to make shapes and practice arranging drawn and cut shapes to represent ideas.
-Skills: self-expression, creative expression, fine motor strength and control in hand and finger muscles.

Sensory
-Materials: fine sand, plastic frogs, lizards, and snakes, sticks, rocks
-Rationale: To provide an opportunity for the children to represent their knowledge of these animas and also engage in symbolic play with peers.
-Skills: sensory stimulation, knowledge of physical properties, symbolic play, creative expression, representational abilities

Science
Materials: insect pictures: caterpillars, beetles, frogs, grasshoppers, worms, etc, paper, makers/pencils. Seed sorting activity on light table with magnifiers and photos of plant life-cycles. A calendar for charting spring time weather patterns.
Rationale: We will give children an opportunity to express their interests, curiosity, questions or personal experiences with insects on the paper covered board of insects. This will raise awareness as we enter into the spring season and begin encountering more insects. We are also building collective awareness of plants by beginning with a variety of seeds for comparison and examination. Questions are posted to promote thinking and the sharing of ideas. The weather calendar will encourage children hone their observation skills by looking at the sky in order to chart different types of weather and record rising temperatures.
Skills: Generating ideas, making predictions, develop factual knowledge, scientific inquiry, critical thinking, making comparisons, sorting, observation and recording skills.

Language and Literacy
-Materials: new non-fiction books related to curriculum, tape-stories in loft, mailboxes, envelopes, organizer with children's names, an assortment of writing materials such as pens, pencils, markers, paper, tape, stickers, staplers, letter of the week "R" materials, a variety of fiction and non-fiction books.
-Rationale: We introduced tape stories to the loft as a way for children to gather together in a cozy place to enjoy the written word. They will also have the opportunity to independently follow the story line through illustrations and by listening for the cue to turn the page.
-Skills: fine motor, communication through writing/dictation, awareness of symbol systems, expansion of vocabulary, expression of thought, effective social interaction, letter recognition

Math and Manipulatives
-Materials: spring bingo cards, mosaic pattern blocks, symmetrical interlocking puzzles, mirrors.
-Rationale: The spring bingo cards provide an opportunity to practice matching in the context of a group game with rules. The geometric shapes and mosaic pattern blocks are conducive to teaching/learning symmetry and also allow for hands-on exploration of this concept.
-Skills: matching, line patterns, geometry, spatial skills, patterns, symmetry, reasoning, problem solving, logical thinking, games with rules, fine motor

Dramatic Play
-Materials: frog and bird costumes, kitchen table and props, small plastic animals and woodland cave.
-Rationale: The frog and bird costumes give the children an opportunity to play out "spring themed" play scenes. They can reflect what they are learning about these animals and the change of seasons to use as a basis for their dramatic play. The symbolic cave is available with small plastic animals, fabric, and wood pieces for the children to use as they represent the changes they see in the outdoor environment and animal behavior.
-Skills: Role-play, symbolic play, peer interactions, social skills, social problem solving, sharing, symbolic representation, receptive language, listening skills, cooperation.

Blocks
-Materials: Unit blocks, insects, hollow blocks, thin boards, cove molding, clipboards, variety of small wood shapes.
-Rationale: The insects in the block area provide inspiration for building in new ways in order to create houses, caves, traps, etc.
-Skills: creative building, problem-solving, spatial skills, geometry, symmetry, symbolic representation, manual dexterity, upper body strength, group cooperation, listening skills.

Large Motor
Gym
-Materials: Roller slide, cushioned "rock", monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge
-Rationale: New roller slide provides the challenge of climbing to the top with the aid of a rope and the thrill of rolling down. The new cushioned rock is used to enhance balance and core strength as the children attempt to steady themselves without sliding off.
-Skills: balance, core-strength, coordination, grasping skills, climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Playground
-Materials: shovels, buckets, bikes, insect examination cases, sidewalk chalk
-Rationale: We will continue to encourage upper body strength and coordination through digging in both the sand and soil. We are also supporting the development of propulsive skills through swinging and bike riding. The children took the initiative in using sidewalk chalk to draw a racetrack for the bikes---extra motivation to get rolling!
-Skills: Upper body strength, cardio vascular endurance, propulsion skills, social skills, balance, movement through space.

Special Interest
New fish were added last Friday! Brianne's fiancé Will brought in more Zebra Danios, sword tail, rainbow shark, and ghost shrimp to keep our lonely fish company. This of course sparked new excitement about fish which we will support by adding new reference materials and encouraging the children to share their interests and curiosities.

Snack
Monday - Pineapple Smoothies
Tuesday - Oranges & wheat crackers
Wednesday - Animal Crackers (Field Trip)
Thursday - Graham crackers & pumpkin butter
Friday- Popcorn & milk

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Weekly Lesson Plan For Ross' Class
Week of: 4/11/11 -- 4/15/11
Lead Teaching This Week: Team

Overview: Not only are the temperatures increasing, but the levels of fun, excitement, and interest in looking at the natural world continue to rise! First, we will be support the interest in theatre with a trip to the Children's Theatre Company (on Wednesday) to see the stage/set of Annie. This trip will help us create the theatre in the back of our classroom - using the children's observations as the driving force for the changes/additions to the area. Other areas of excitement have been related to the addition of living things in the classroom: specifically the guinea pigs (Rosebud and Sam) and the freshly planted seed pouches and pots. With the inclusion of these living things, we will begin focusing on "responsibility" and learning how to care for the pigs and plants. Daily checklists will be made with the children to help them foster their understanding of how to care for living things as well as help them develop an understanding of responsibility that comes with them.

Expressive Art (paint, collage, clay)
• Materials: Art table: various natural/ "beautiful" materials for creating bird nests (e.g. coffee filters for shaping, and paper shreds, lichen, and yarn).
Clay table: Clay, wires, popsicle sticks, gems
• Rationale: With the arrival of spring, we will expand on our three dimensional collage art by looking at, and then creating our own bird nests. We will look in nature, and examine real bird nests. Questions for children - "What materials might a bird use to build a nest? What would you use?" in order to further that interest. The children will also explore outside around the school for more materials that could be used in the building.
At the clay table the children have worked on sculpting plants, and many children have expressed interest in creating animals. To extend the exploration of nests to the clay table we will focus on sculpting nests along with objects such as eggs and animals that live in nests.
• Skills: observations of the real world, fine motor, creativity, artistic expression, sensory exploration, opportunities for social interactions, generalizing

Sensory (water/bubble table)
• Materials: water, soap, dishes from dramatic play area, sponges, drying rack, towels, baby dolls, snack cups.
• Rationale: This past week we thought we would try and revive the bubble table by suggesting to the children that we wash the dishes from the dramatic play area. The children positively responded to this extension and they have really enjoyed doing this activity. This week we are going to expand on this interest by asking the children, "What else can we/needs to be washed [in our classroom]?" We hope to strengthen the home-to-school connection by inviting the children to think of/discuss what things they wash at home. One possibility we anticipate is "ourselves" and since we cannot climb into the bubble table for a quick bath, we will have baby dolls ready to wash. We may also encourage the children to use the soap water to wash their own cups after snack.
• Skills: creative thinking, planning and brainstorming, symbolic representation, social skills, generalizing.

Math and Manipulative
• Materials: new puzzles that highlight classroom topics (i.e. plants, seeds, birds, as well as more fractions), new games with rules (i.e. Snail's Pace), shape matching game Perfection, pre-/early-literacy game Boggle Jr., shape/spatial awareness game Blokus
• Rationale: We will further our exploration of fractions, shapes, spatial planning, and looking at "how things come together" (one-to-one correspondence/part-to-whole relationships). Snail's Pace, a turn taking game lets the children race their "snails" as well as supporting developing executive function skills.
• Skills: shape recognition/matching, spatial awareness, 1-to-1 correspondence, counting, numeral awareness, social skills, executive functioning (i.e. waiting of a turn/impulse control)

Science
• Materials: at the table: seedling pouches and planting pots, notebook, magnifying glass, water
in the cave: multi link cubes for plant/flower making
• Rationale: The children have shown a great interest in exploring plant growth. Last Thursday we "dissected" a dead plant from the room and examined the various parts of it (e.g. the leaves, the roots, the stems). Friday the children started two interesting bean seedling projects: one inviting the children to put a bean in a plastic bag with a wet cotton ball to observe the germination and the other plant a seed in the soil and learning how to take on the "responsibility" of caring for a plant. This week the children will be watching and caring for their sprouting seeds/beans, observing as they sprout and record the changes in their journals.
• Skills: observation, scientific thinking and reasoning, hypothesis creating/testing, social skills

The "Nook" (the room behind the art area)
• Materials: guinea pigs and all there supplies
• Rationale: Rosebud (Rosie) and Sam have made it safely to school and now getting used to their new environments. As they grow more comfortable, we will "open up" the room to allow small groups of children to come in and visit the pigs. Will they be coming out this week? We'll see how it goes...but it's very clear: the children are very excited to have them here!
• Skills: responsibility/pet-care skills, turn taking, following directions, recalling prior knowledge of caring for other living things

Language and Literacy
• Materials: writing supplies (lined/unlined paper, markers, pencils, pens), props for making tickets and money, alphabet stamps, tape, stamps, stickers
• Rationale: With all the excitement of the theatre and shows, we will utilize the writing area as our ticket and money making station. The children will be able to personalize their creations. The teachers will be there to help the children practice their pre-/early-literacy skills as well as continue to support writing skills.
• Skills: letter recognition and awareness, pre-/early-literacy skills, awareness of writing/concepts of print, fine-motor strength/coordination

Dramatic Play
• Materials: fabric, dress-up shoes, capes, keys, scarves, cell phones, play food/flatware, theatre props that will come from the children's thoughts/ideas/observations from the Children's Theatre field trip
• Rationale: The children have shown an interest in creating and performing plays. This week the class will have the opportunity to visit the Children's Theatre. To build upon this excitement the class will help deconstruct the post office and build their own classroom theatre. The information gained from the field trip will help the children include multiple areas in their new dramatic play arrangement such as a concession stand, ticket office, and stage. This new arrangement will create exciting dramatic play opportunities.
• Skills: social skills, creativity, storytelling skills, discussion and problem solving, planning and brainstorming

Blocks
• Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, peg people, long/short planks, wood cubes
• Rationale: Last week we highlighted the small block area as a choice after large group, and saw some very focused/thoughtful building taking place. We will continue to offer this area and invited some of our "non-regular" block builders into the area to see what they can do with these materials. We will also continue to utilize the small blocks as props for the various plays that are being created each day.
• Skills: large-motor strength and coordination, fine-motor skills, social skills (including collaboration, communicating, and negotiating), creativity, symbolic representation, concepts of balance and stability

Large Motor
• Materials: in the gym: rolling ladder (the steamroller, rolling mountain...we're still working on a name for this new piece of equipment), monkey bars, A-frame bridge, donut "train" (bolsters linked together by the children - connected to the donut slide)
on the playground: TRICYCLES!, buckets, shovels, sticks, pinecones, climber, BIG monkey bars
• Rationale: This week we added one of our new pieces of equipment that we purchased with the money raised at the GYM JAM. It's a great rolling-bolster slide/bridge that challenges the children's balance, core strength, upper-/lower-body strength/coordination/endurance. All that and it's a lot of fun! The outdoors have dried, the sand is no longer frozen...it is gorgeous on the playground. We will be spending more and more time outside to enjoy nature and more our bodies!
• Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Special Interest/Announcements
- Thanks to everyone for your help and contributions to the Spring Soiree and the Lab School Scholarship Fund! It's an amazing part of the year to see so many families working together to make this event happen. Whether you were able to attend or not, your time/energy/generosity is and was greatly appreciated!
- Don't forget about our field trip to the Children's Theatre Company on Wednesday. Please turn in your permission slips on Monday if you haven't done so already. Also, please remember that we will be come back towards the end of pick-up - so plan on showing up closer to 11.30a to pick up your child.
- Research is now taking place in the room...a participation sheet will be sent home if your child got to "play the game" at school.
- The playground is DRY! Send the rain boots on soggy days. We will also try to head outside every day, even when it is rainy. Please send any rain gear if you have it. We do have ponchos at school for those who do not have a rain jacket!

Snack
Monday: trail mix
Tuesday: crackers and frozen peas
Wednesday: animal crackers (field trip snack that we will bring with us)
Thursday: graham crackers and pumpkin butter
Friday: popcorn (made by the children!)
* All snacks served with milk and water unless otherwise noted *

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Student Teachers Co-Teaching Week

Overview: Last week was certainly a busy week for our classroom. We got to know our new classroom pets, guinea pigs named Sam and Rosebud! The children did an excellent job observing the animals quietly so that they would feel comfortable in our classroom. This week, the children will begin visiting with the guinea pigs in small groups. This will give them a chance to observe the way these animals move and interact, and also introduce them to some of the basic needs guinea pigs have. Additionally, the children will practice appropriate ways to approach the cage and interact with the animals. In addition to our new animals, the children will also begin planting some of the seeds we have explored this session, including the seeds we gathered when making guacamole last week. This week will be full of exploring, observing, and caring for living things in our classroom.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: Blokus, Boggle Jr., crayons and notepad for Boggle word writing, Perfection, interlocking puzzles, construction floor puzzling, interlocking food puzzles, shape/fraction puzzles
•Rationale: To introduce children to games with rules that relate to print awareness, numeral recognition, and knowledge of shape. To introduce children to simple ways to identify and describe shapes and to create new shapes from smaller shapes. To introduce children to our upcoming restaurant in the dramatic play area we have food puzzle for the children to work with. Because many children have been really enjoying working with the puzzles and because of the many constructions going on around the U and in the block center, the construction floor puzzle will be available this week.
•Skills: print awareness, part-whole relationships, shape recognition and matching, shape combination, spatial awareness, one-to-one correspondence, turn-taking, social skills.

Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: primary color paint at the easel, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, natural collage materials, watercolors, brushes, spray bottles, textured watercolor paper
•Rationale: to explore new tools and media with hands and eyes, promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships and communication skills as children work on collaborative and individual projects. To help build sense of classroom community by watercoloring collaborative paintings to hang in our school hallway.
•Skills: creativity, artistic expression, fine motor development (strength, coordination), sharing ideas and materials, symbolic representation, color recognition
Clay
•Materials: Clay, hammers, clay knives, craft sticks, pencils, toothpicks
•Rationale: to promote sensory awareness and provide both a creative and social opportunity for children as they increase their fine motor skills. To begin representing ideas and objects in a 3-D medium. Additionally, the children can begin saving their clay creations, working on them for several days, and drying them out to create a permanent art object.
•Skills: sensory input, symbolic representation, observation, sharing materials, and fine motor development (strength, coordination)

Sensory
•Materials: water, soap/bubbles, rotary egg beaters, whisks, measuring pitchers, mixing bowls, baby tubs, baby washing cloths, baby dolls.
•Rationale: to allow encourage experimentation with soap and water and the processes that create bubbles. To facilitate imaginative play including cooking, making potions, washing dishes and baby bathing. We've been discussing babies doing large group because one of the children has just had a new baby brother. The babies and soap will introduce concepts of care-taking for others.
•Skills: sensory input/developing an awareness of senses, observation of physical changes, creative thinking, fine motor, knowledge of physical properties/cause and effect, comparison, symbolic representation, sharing materials

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Restaurant center props (aprons, chef hats, cardboard pizza boxes, felt food, dishes), housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), writing supplies (menus, paper, pencils, markers) dress-up fabric, shoes, accessories such as keys, cell phones, necklaces, and purses
•Rationale: A new center to facilitate and strengthen dramatic play related to working at and visiting a restaurant. To follow the children's continued interest with delivering packages, pizza boxes will be included for delivery of pizzas. To encourage cooperative play and highlight another job, pizza deliver/waiter in our community and what it takes to perform that job.
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, peer interaction, turn taking, social problem solving, symbolic representation, literacy

Language and Literacy
Writing Center
•Materials: menus, food order forms, paper, alphabet stamps, a variety of writing utensils, scissors
•Rationale: to promote print and letter awareness while incorporating dramatic play with the menus and food order forms.
•Skills: awareness of print, connecting speech to print and print to speech, letter recognition, pre-writing, receptive language, fine motor, creative expression, social interaction, awareness of others, community building
Library
•Materials: Books about seeds, spring, and babies. Books about restaurants, pizza, and other types of food have also been added.
•Rationale: to support pre-literacy skills, to familiarize children with new books, and to allow for quiet time in the classroom, to use books as resources for non-fiction information
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, awareness of print, listening, community building

Science
Materials: Magnifying glasses, flowers, paper, pencils, markers, measuring tools (rulers and tape measurers), dirt, pots, seeds, water
Rationale: Magnifying glasses enable the children to examine the flower growing in our classroom and notice changes in the flower as it grows. We have been doing a lot of talking about seeds and plants growing. This activity will give the students a chance to see a plant that is in the process of growing. We are adding the measuring tools so the students can measure how much the plant grows. Also, planting new seeds allows children to connect the previously explored seeds to the plants they grow into.
Skills: Exploration, fine motor, drawing, measuring, language
Caves:
Materials: Colored linking blocks, paper, markers.
Rationale: In the caves we have been letting the children explore with the colored linking blocks. The children have shown interest in created flowers, trees, and gardens. This week we are going to encourage them to continue to make flowers and begin to talk about patterns. As teachers make patterns with the blocks and describe patterns, children will be able to explore with the blocks to create patterns of their own.
Skills: Fine motor, pattern constructing, memory expansion, color recognition, cooperation, planning skills, language

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, multi-colored shape blocks, small wooden cube blocks, small wooden rods, steering wheels, paper and pencils, easel
•Rationale: To foster current dramatic play themes, to encourage planful and purposeful approaches to building including drawing or writing plans and blueprints, to combine different materials in order to create new structures, to allow for individual building and collaborative work
•Skills: large motor development, dramatic play, creating imaginary scenarios, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking

Large Motor
Gym
Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge
, rolling climber/slide, rocking seat
•Rationale: to provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges.
 The rolling climber (purchased with our gym jam money) allows children to use upper- and lower-body strength as they climb on an unstable surface. It also encourages appropriate risk-taking as they slide down when they are finished.
•Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills * Look for additions later in the week!
Playground
•Materials: shovels, scoops, buckets, dishes for dramatic play, rakes, tricycles, and wagons
•Rationale: The melted snow has revealed plenty of sand, leaves, grass for the children to explore. Digging in wet sand, raking leaves, and riding trikes around the playground create opportunities for social interaction, cooperation, role play, and lots of large motor experiences.
•Skills: upper and lower body strength, physical fitness, perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness), building community through social interactions.
Special Interest
This week, our very capable student teachers will begin leading large groups and initiating our classroom transitions.
Snack
Monday - Trail mix & milk
Wednesday - Saltines & frozen peas
Thursday - Rice cakes & raisins
*** All snacks are served with milk and water unless otherwise noted

April 11th-15th
Student Teachers Co-Lead Teaching

Overview

Our goals this week are to build on some unexpected "rich moments" which occurred last week (the delivery of a package from the Fed Ex truck and the sighting of wild turkeys in our playground), focusing on extensions of this material. We also hope to begin exploring the magic of new life by studying plants, animals, and the growth process. Our study of various aspects of spring will be brought to life with a field trip down to the bridge over the river, where we will notice the differences in the river environment from our trip in January.

Expressive Arts

**Materials: butcher paper, markers and crayons, large stencils. Rationale: To practice fine motor skill of following an outline. To engage in a social art experience. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, writing grasp, creative expression, awareness of self and others.

Cave
**Materials: light box, artificial petals, stems, roots (parts of a flower/plant), books about plants/growing. Rationale: To promote creative expression and begin the process of thinking about plants and growth. Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, new vocabulary words

Sensory

**Materials: hard plastic shapes that leave leaf and flower like impressions on the playdough, playdough, rolling pins, cookie cutters, and various playdough tools. Rationale: To encourage children to think about springtime and growth in an unexpected area in the classroom via plant impressions on the dough. Skills: making connections, communication, turn taking, trial and error (what amount of dough works for the best impression), problem-solving, symbolic representation

**Materials: water, different species of turtles (toy replicas), rocks, and artificial plants. Rationale: To promote awareness of nature and the habitat of animals in our classroom and world. To enhance observation and perception skills through exploring turtles' habitat. Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, expanding vocabulary (Species of turtles)

Science

**Materials: Pinecones, sunbutter (peanut free), bird seed, string, log record of the kinds of birds coming to the bird feeders. Rationale: To promote exploration of the world around us and to observe the birds eating from the feeders near the lab school. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypotheses and predictions. Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness of how and what birds eat.

**Materials: seeds, plant cuttings, various clear containers full of water, "observation log". Rationale: To give children the opportunity to witness the sprouting of a seed and build awareness of the individual parts of plants. Skills: observation, exploration, communication, recording, responsibility, hypothesis, new vocabulary words.

Outside/Science
**Materials: gardener's gloves, trowels, small shovels, watering cans, plant seeds. Rationale: To explore what it means to be a gardener outside of the classroom by taking care of live vegetation (or pretending to). Skills: hypothesis, communication, exploration, creative expression, symbolic representation, turn taking, observation, role-play, cause and effect

We will also be going on nature walks to explore the animals that live near the lab school. Last week we saw wild turkeys through the gym windows and on our playground.
**Materials: camera, clipboard and pen. Rationale: To explore nature and to get a better understanding of wild animals. To promote an awareness of nature and animal habitats. Skills: observation, hypothesis and predictions, recording, exploration and communication.

Dramatic Play

**Materials: mail carrier dress up, packages, scales to weigh the various packages, books about mail and delivery jobs, clipboards to map out route, steering wheels, and postage. Rationale: To begin to explore a specific delivery jobs in response to the interest in the garbage and recycling trucks in the block area and the recent delivery by the FedEx truck on the playground. Using simple maps to draw and "plan out" a route for delivering the mail. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: balancing scales, packages (various weights of packages) Rationale: To expand on children's interest in heavy vs. light as well as big, bigger, biggest and small, smaller, smallest. To introduce scales and how to read them to explain various math concepts (i.e., this package is heavier than this one) Skills: sorting, classification, comparison, weight
**Materials: Puzzles of delivery trucks/construction themed trucks, tools, pet animals and a frog. Rationale: To encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination, and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.

**Materials: Sorting/seriation/counting blocks. Rationale: To promote one-to-one correspondence, counting with meaning, recognition of number groupings (three and four objects in a group).
**Materials: Small logs. Rationale: To provide an open-ended block building activity with a fine motor focus.
**Materials: Fraction puzzle. Rationale: To explore the concepts of whole, half, thirds, and fourths.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: shipping "invoices," clipboards, pens. Recycling and mail related symbols. Recording implements for scientific observations. Rationale: To bring awareness to the process of recording information and thoughts. To begin to recognize symbols and print as conveying meaning. Skills: pre-writing, translating thoughts into recorded form, organizing thoughts into symbols, recognition of symbols.

**Materials: books relating to construction, spring, plants, turtles and other animals, babies, and transportation of goods. Rationale: To explore books as media for researching topics of interest. To support the development of book and print concepts. Skills: concepts of books and print, using pictures in books to gain information.

Blocks

**Materials: Blocks, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, cement trucks, blue trucks with FedEx symbol, gas pumps, tubes and bottle caps as cargo, small wooden cars, road signs, and small symbolic "people" figures. Rationale: To expand off the growing interest in the garbage trucks and to introduce other various delivery trucks. To explore symbols and their meaning (i.e. the FedEx symbol, recycling symbol etc.) To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures. Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, foam roller slide with rope, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge. Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The foam roller slide provides a new challenge of using upper body strength to pull up and risk taking to slide down. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking.

Large Group

This week, our large groups will involve books, songs, and fingerplays relating to plants, animals, construction. We will read social stories about recent exciting events, such as the turkeys or the Fed Ex delivery and model new activities in the room, such as the "flower making" activity in the cave or the delivery dramatic play.

Music/Movement

**Materials: songs brought in by families, drums, xylophone, finger cymbals. Rationale: To promote pitch and rhythm development. To engage in social musical activities. To explore the cause and effect of musical instruments. Skills: fine motor, hand-eye coordination, pitch and rhythm, awareness of each other.

Snacks:
Monday - Pretzels & raisins
Wednesday - Bread Pudding & milk
Thursday - Animal crackers & milk

Overview
Spring has officially arrived. We are taking each and every opportunity to explore this wonderful season. We will continue to use the artistic concept of lines and shapes to express our understandings. We will discuss, explore and continue to provoke children's questions regarding spring and connecting this idea with our overarching topic of life cycles. Our classroom now offers opportunities to start the investigation of plants and insects and their connection to this spring season. Our field trip to the Conservatory will inspire us and allow us to further our investigations.

Expressive Arts
-Materials: thin and thick markers, crayons, colored pencils, tape, staplers, glue sticks, construction paper, paper punchers.
-Rationale: To continue to work on children's understanding of the artistic element of line, making shapes and using these to make compositions.
-Skills: exploration of lines and shapes, observation, fine motor strength and control, self-expression.
Sensory
-Materials: sensory table filled with fine sand, tree, sticks and frogs, lizards, and snakes.
-Rationale: To connect with our topic of life cycles and provide opportunities for rich social interactions.
-Skills: sensory stimulation, free exploration of sand, symbolic play, social interactions.
Science
-Materials: variety of seeds on the light table, photos of insects, clipboards, pencils, mealworms, tadpole, fish.
-Rationale: To encourage children's observation and examination of different kinds of seeds; how they grow, what they need and how they look like after grown. To deepen our understanding of life cycles.
-Skills: scientific inquiry, observation, comparison, reasoning, investigation of the natural world and exploration, peer interactions, sorting, descriptive language, self-expression (journal entries).
Language and Literacy

-Materials: books about, spring, birds, and plants. Letter tiles, pens, pencils, markers, staplers, tape, paper, envelopes, and stencils.
-Rationale: we continue to focus on print awareness and incorporation of the concept of symmetry by exploring alphabet letters that show symmetry as well as words that display this quality. We will continue to encourage talking, writing, and using books as informational resources. 

-Skills: awareness of print, awareness of print that displays symmetry, self-expression through talking, writing, drawing, awareness of the purpose of print and letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and connecting speech to print and print to speech, fine motor, vocabulary, social interactions.
Math and Manipulatives

We continue to focus on symmetry. Our field trip to the Como Conservatory will give us an additional opportunity to experience this concept first hand.
-Materials: variety of interlocking puzzles, mosaic pattern blocks, button mosaic.
-Rationale: To provide opportunities to become aware and explore the quality of symmetry.
-Skills: geometry, symmetry, patterns, reasoning, observation, classification, sorting, comparison, matching, logical thinking.
Dramatic Play
- Materials: Back of the classroom: kitchen with dishes, fruits and veggies. Animal inspired costumes. In the symbolic play cave we have an assortment of stuffed owls and squirrels, plastic woodland animals, frogs and turtles, wood piece and small pieces of cloth.
-Rationale: Continue to explore spring and offer opportunities for social interactions and socio-dramatic play.
-Skills: role-play, peer interactions, social problem solving, cooperation, symbolic representation.
Blocks 

-Materials: hollow blocks, unit blocks, thin boards, clipboards, and additional wood shapes.
-Rationale: To provide opportunities for creative play in general and creative building in particular. We continue to focus on symmetry. 


-Skills: creative building, spatial awareness, symmetry, large motor skills, balance, directional awareness, symbolic representation, and social interaction skills.
Large Motor
Gym
-Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge, half circle foam piece.
-Rationale: To provide climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges.
Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk, construction skills, core strength and balance.
Playground
-Materials: shovels, buckets, bikes.
-Rationale: The children have been enjoying using the wheeled equipment! We are happy to dig, climb, run and engage in socio dramatic play.
-Skills: cardio vascular, endurance, upper and lower body strength, social skills, balance, movement through space.

Special interest
Large Group


Preparation for our field trip to the Como Conservatory and follow up.

Field trip
Visit the Como Conservatory on Wednesday, April 13th. We will meet at the entrance between 12:45-12:50. Those taking a ride from the Lab School will meet at the curb by 12:30. We would like to be on our way by 12:35.
Thank you!!

See you all around,

Dalia

Overview

As we settle into our routines and get to know each other, we will be able to delve deeper into areas of interest this week. The disappearance of snow on our playground and the revelation of sand, grass, plants, and mud underneath lends itself to small group nature walks to look for other "signs of spring," as well as an exploration of mixing wet and dry substances to make new compounds, which will be explored through cooking and sensory projects. We have begun to notice more construction vehicles and garbage trucks passing our playground on their way to road construction sites, which has led some children to become interested in road construction, cargo transportation, and bridge and tunnel building in the block area.

Expressive Arts

In the art area this week, we will expand our creation of "fire" in the dramatic play area to make smaller fires to carry around the room and hoses to put them out. **Materials: Tubes, fire and water colored ribbon, strips of paper, string, tape, glue, paint.
Rationale: To provide a collaborative art experience. To promote social interaction and creative expression. To practice symbolic representation and dramatic play.
 Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, collaboration, social interaction, symbolic representation, visual-spatial awareness

Sensory

**Materials: play dough, cooking utensils, cut-outs, wet and dry ingredients 
Rationale: To promote the development of fine motor and pre-writing skills through squeezing and grasping dough and utensils. To provide a medium for creative expression.
**Materials: water, large and small containers, large buckets
Rationale: To promote problem solving and cooperation through striving for a common goal (filling a large bucket). To explore pre-math and science skills of cause and effect, conservation of volume, comparison of volume, and properties of liquids. To increase awareness of each other through parallel and cooperative play.
Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, shape vocabulary (round container, square container and hexagon container)

Science

**Materials: Variety of magnets of different sizes and strengths, clipboard and pen. 
Rationale: To allow exploration of the distinctive force of magnetism. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypothesis and predictions. 
Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness that magnets attract on one side but repulse on opposite side. Trial and error (determining which objects connect with magnets and which don't.)

Dramatic Play
**Materials: Fire trucks, fire coats, hats and boots, cell phones, blocks, kitchen, clipboards for drawing maps, firefighting and emergency symbols.
Rationale: To continue to explore the story line of "firefighter." To explore the meaning of symbols through recognizing environmental print (for example, exit sign) and using simple maps to find the "fire" in our classroom. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play
**Materials: Airplanes, loose parts for runways, small symbolic play characters, garbage trucks, other load bearing trucks. Rationale: To connect the scenarios of airplanes with other cargo trucks. To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures.
Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Science/Dramatic Play
**Materials: woodland animals, natural materials. Rationale: provide the raw material for exploration of the themes of animal habitats as winter comes to a close. Skills: vocabulary (woodland animals, bears, beavers, hibernation, lair) awareness of change of seasons, storytelling, and creative symbolic representation (cave building materials)

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: round, square, and long objects in colors of purple, blue, and yellow; sorting box. Rationale: To promote classification and grouping skills by sorting by color and shape. Skills: matching, sorting, color and shape identification.
**Materials: cones labeled 1-4 with numbers and place holders, small wooden blocks to place on the appropriate squares. Rationale: To promote the mathematical concept of number correspondence with amount, one to one correspondence, ordering.
**Materials: large and small "pill shaped" tubes Rationale: Fine motor work, sorting and color matching. Skills: shape awareness, classification, fine motor
**Materials: Puzzles of airplanes, woodland animals, birds. Rationale: encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.
**Materials: Seriation Blocks, Skills: seriation, balance.
**Materials: Peg builders. Rationale: provide an early small material construction experience with pegs and boards which are easily connected. Skills: persistence, fine motor, hand strength, motor planning, creativity as well as following model and directions.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: Name cards, Books on spring, wind, magnets, new babies, toileting, alphabet, firefighters, and story books, Environmental print and symbols including emergency symbols and airline logos. 
Rationale: To encourage pre-literacy skills, development of vocabulary relative to classroom theme areas, and create awareness of letters by singing about our names and the letters in our names. To facilitate discussion of print and word meanings. 
Skills: Literacy, communication, letter awareness, listening, turn-taking, letter names, understanding of symbols as conveying meaning.

Blocks

**Materials: large red brick blocks, small red brick blocks, unit blocks, fire trucks, airplanes, trucks, half-circle tunnel shapes, flat planks.
Rationale: To promote the use of blocks to construct roads, tunnels, bridges, and building. To provide a medium for practicing hand-eye coordination, motor planning, balance, construction, and engineering skills. Skills: Inquiry, symbolic representation, large and fine motor, creative expression, understanding of gravity and mass.

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Large Group

**Materials: Books about spring, where animals sleep, airplane song, name cards with letter song (I know a girl and her name is Betty, B-E-T-T-Y). Rationale: To bring awareness to the change in seasons. To promote letter and name awareness. To support the development of rhythm, pitch, and patterning. Skills: Sequencing, turn-taking, follow directions, communication, listening, attention span, musical awareness.

Music/Movement

**Materials: new drums, maracas, piano, sandpaper blocks, movement ribbons and scarves.
Rationale: To promote sound experimentation by exploring different instruments. To experiment with volume and tone. To connect sound to the sense of hearing. To encourage movement to music and promote dance as a form of creative expression. 
Skills: imitation, communication, sense awareness, creative expression, beat and tone awareness

Weekly Lesson Plan For Ross' Class
Week of: 4/4/11 -- 4/8/11
Lead Teaching This Week: Ross

Overview: I think it's safe to say that spring is now officially here! It's also safe to say that the children were extremely excited and eager to get back to school. Their energy was high and lots of reconnecting took place last week. The new student teachers have quickly adjusted to the daily schedule and are looking ready for the "full-speed-ahead" mentality of our classroom. The children have been tackling the more challenging games/activities/questions facilitated by the teachers with a smile on their face and a desire to try something "just a bit more harder." As we continue into the spring session, that will be a main focus with the children - challenging their high-level thinking skills with rich exploration of materials, inquiry related to the discussion of new information/ideas, and finally utilizing that new knowledge into other areas of the room/aspects of daily life!

Expressive Art (paint, collage, clay)
• Materials: Art table: pencils, pens, ultra-fine tip markers, various natural/ "beautiful" materials for collage (acorns, seedpods, twigs, etc.), beads, tiles, boxes, markers, crayons, glue, tape
Clay table: clay, thick wire, tools for carving/sculpting, wet sponges, sculpting "accessories" (e.g. wood beads, glass gems, etc.)
• Rationale: The children have been very excited and inspired by the new, natural materials in the art area. We have needed to replenish them almost daily! One major theme has been the creation of bird nests using a variety of materials. We will continue to explore this topic by adding supportive materials (yarn, wire, straw, paper scraps, etc.), however we will also ask the question, "How do birds actually build their nests?" in hopes to create some interest in further exploring the interest. At the clay table, we have seen many large-scale sculptures being created during our first week back. To add further support as well as another level of intentionality/planning, we will save the creations and have the sculptor(s) come back the following day and think about what else they would like to add. With all the excitement from the first week, we will be putting the focus on learning how to draw and exploring lines on hold for now.
• Skills: fine motor strength/coordination, creative/artistic expression, critical thinking/planning skills, social skills,

Sensory (water/bubble table)
• Materials: water, bubbles, whisks, rotary egg beaters, measuring cups/pitchers, mixing bowls
• Rationale: The bubbles have been a HUGE hit! We saw many visitors at the bubble-table this week and the children were enthralled with making as many bubbles as they could. As the week carried on, questions about "how are they made," "where are they coming from," and "how come there are so many," were asked by the children. This week we will investigate those questions as well as try to "invent" new ways to make more/bigger/longer bubbles using new/found tools.
• Skills: knowledge/understanding related to the physical properties of water/bubbles, scientific thinking, hypothesis creating/testing, negotiation, cooperative/collaborative conversations, problem solving, sensory experience

Math and Manipulative
• Materials: shape matching game Perfection, pre-/early-literacy game Boggle Jr., shape/spatial awareness game Blokus, new puzzles
• Rationale: It has become quite clear: the game Perfection is a favorite for nearly everyone in the room - children and adults alike! It has offered a great challenge with shape recognition/matching as well as creating great opportunities for children to work together...sometimes trying to beat the timer before it "explodes the pieces!" The Blokus games also posed an interesting challenge to many, bringing several children together to work collaboratively to try and get all the pieces in the board - a difficult challenge for anyone who dares try it. Lots of great critical thinking and problem solving skills taking place in this area!
• Skills: shape recognition/matching, spatial awareness, 1-to-1 correspondence, counting, numeral awareness, social skills, executive functioning (i.e. waiting of a turn/impulse control)

Science
• Materials: at the table: various seeds, tweezers, sorting try
in the cave: multi link cubes for plant/flower making
• Rationale: This week will be begin a stronger focus on exploring the seeds and plants in the classroom. Last week, a "mystery" plant arrived at our satellite science table next to the cubbies and intrigued many of the children. "What is it?" was muttered by many, and this week (well, right away on Monday) the children will have the answer as the buds have sprouted over the weekend! We anticipate this will be a big draw to the science area and we will use it to think about were plants come from and how they grow. We will also have Kari (Alma's mom) joining us on Friday to begin a planting project with the children. All this and with the snow melting, it means the plants will start sprouting soon (if they haven't already)!
• Skills: fostering knowledge of plants and life cycles, scientific thinking/reasoning, social skills, hypothesis creating/testing, focusing/exploring the transitional changes that accompany the changing of the seasons

The "Nook" (the room behind the art area)
• Materials: Projector, wire of various thickness, objects that cast an interestingly shaped shadow
• Rationale: At large group this week, we highlighted the new materials for overhead projector in the Nook, and demonstrated how these simple simples will cast basic shadows. However, these simple shadows can be arranged to create something far more interesting - we moved around rocks and wire to make a happy face. Several children have gone back to make their own "shadow pictures." We will keep this focus and support it by adding new, interestingly-shaped/potentially-moldable materials.
• Skills: Creativity/imagination, concepts related to light and shadow, symbolic representation, storytelling

Language and Literacy
• Materials: writing supplies (lined/unlined paper, markers, pencils, pens), envelops, alphabet book, alphabet stamps, mailboxes, tape, stamps, stickers
• Rationale: Letters, cards, and pictures continue to be a constant creation at the writing table. The teachers are continually stepping over to help spell/sound out words with the children. As we continue through the spring session, we will explore the alphabet/phonemes with more intention - introducing games/activities at large group as well as at the "Question of the Day." The writing center will be our main "hub" for writing and pre-/early-literacy support by adding alphabet and phonemic books (printed as well as created by the children) to help support the children's growing understanding of the printed/written word.
• Skills: letter recognition and awareness, pre-/early-literacy skills, awareness of writing/concepts of print, fine-motor strength/coordination

Dramatic Play
• Materials: post office props, fabric, a "stage," curtains, various food/jewelry/clothing props for the different plays being created
• Rationale: Earlier this week at large group, we asked the children, "If we were going to change the post office to something different, what should we change it to?" The immediate answer was a theater "where we could have a stage and put on plays and shows!" And that's exactly what happened! An eruption of improv plays filled the back of the classroom for the last few days as children acted out plays about spies, queens, princesses, mermaids, and even a little snippet from "Toy Story 3." Ansa (Cashton's dad) come in and shared some of his acting expertise with the children and they had a blast - inviting the children to use different voices, movements, and props to help "tell the story." This will become the new focus in the area, and we will hopefully take a field trip to see a real stage where real plays are performed in the very near future. We will again have the children be a part of the set up of the area to strengthen their connection/investment to the area.
• Skills: strengthening social relationships/connections, fostering home-school connection, creativity/imagination, numerous social skills (e.g. negotiation, compromise, etc.), learning basic elements/skills of acting, practicing executive function skills/following directions

Blocks
• Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, peg people, long/short planks, wood cubes
• Rationale: With the recently explosion of plays taking place in the back of the room, the blocks (large and small) have been quickly incorporated as various props for the stories being told: at times being the stage, the vehicle, the hide-out, the "scanner," the food, and so on. We will continue to use the blocks as supporting materials for the play daily plays, possibly building a more "permanent" stage in the room with the hollow blocks.
• Skills: large-motor strength and coordination, fine-motor skills, social skills (including collaboration, communicating, and negotiating), creativity, symbolic representation, concepts of balance and stability

Large Motor
• Materials: in the gym: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge
on the playground: LESS snow MORE sand, buckets, shovels, scoops, play dishes, paddles/oars for the boat, swings, climber
• Rationale: The children have really enjoyed the new gym set up: a favorite part being the "donut slide" (see the daily docs for picture). We have noticed a lot more gregariousness from all the children since we have been back - with many pushing themselves to try new/more challenging activities in the gym. To support this (safe) risk-taking, we will continue to modify activities/equipment to each child's needs so they can have that extra challenge. We will also continue to play teacher-facilitated games such as "Sleeping Children," "Over, Under, Through," and the newly popular "Hop, Hop, Dive" to challenge/target specific physical skills.
• Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Special Interest/Announcements
- There is still room for the spring Music Together class. Check the email and/or connect with Frances if you have any questions or are interested in signing up!
- The playground is mucky and wet and will be for a little while longer. Again, PLEASE be sure to send your child's winter weather gear every day. We will let you know when the playground is free and clear of yuck and muck.
- We will have a research study starting soon in the room, and one of the researchers will be joining us on Tuesday to meet the children
- It's almost here...the Spring Soiree is this weekend and thank you to all those who contributed to our basket! It's going to be a great event with many wonderful gifts/auction items that could be yours! We hope to see you all there.

Snack
Monday: Rice cakes and apples
Tuesday: Pasta and red sauce (made by the children)
Wednesday: Pretzels and bananas
Thursday: Animal crackers and applesauce
Friday: Trail mix
* All snacks served with milk and water unless otherwise noted *

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Elizabeth Lead Teaching

Overview

As we settle into our routines and get to know each other, we will be able to delve deeper into areas of interest this week. The disappearance of snow on our playground and the revelation of sand, grass, plants, and mud underneath lends itself to small group nature walks to look for other "signs of spring," as well as an exploration of mixing wet and dry substances to make new compounds, which will be explored through cooking and sensory projects. We have begun to notice more construction vehicles and garbage trucks passing our playground on their way to road construction sites, which has led some children to become interested in road construction, cargo transportation, and bridge and tunnel building in the block area.

Expressive Arts

In the art area this week, we will expand our creation of "fire" in the dramatic play area to make smaller fires to carry around the room and hoses to put them out. **Materials: Tubes, fire and water colored ribbon, strips of paper, string, tape, glue, paint.
Rationale: To provide a collaborative art experience. To promote social interaction and creative expression. To practice symbolic representation and dramatic play.
 Skills: Fine motor, creative expression, collaboration, social interaction, symbolic representation, visual-spatial awareness

Sensory

**Materials: play dough, cooking utensils, cut-outs, wet and dry ingredients 
Rationale: To promote the development of fine motor and pre-writing skills through squeezing and grasping dough and utensils. To provide a medium for creative expression.
**Materials: water, large and small containers, large buckets
Rationale: To promote problem solving and cooperation through striving for a common goal (filling a large bucket). To explore pre-math and science skills of cause and effect, conservation of volume, comparison of volume, and properties of liquids. To increase awareness of each other through parallel and cooperative play.
Skills: Fine motor, problem solving, turn-taking, comparison, observation, collaboration, shape vocabulary (round container, square container and hexagon container)

Science

**Materials: Variety of magnets of different sizes and strengths, clipboard and pen. 
Rationale: To allow exploration of the distinctive force of magnetism. To continue to promote recording of comments and observations. To explore making hypothesis and predictions. 
Skills: hypothesis, predictions, recording, observation, exploration, communication. Awareness that magnets attract on one side but repulse on opposite side. Trial and error (determining which objects connect with magnets and which don't.)

Dramatic Play
**Materials: Fire trucks, fire coats, hats and boots, cell phones, blocks, kitchen, clipboards for drawing maps, firefighting and emergency symbols.
Rationale: To continue to explore the story line of "firefighter." To explore the meaning of symbols through recognizing environmental print (for example, exit sign) and using simple maps to find the "fire" in our classroom. Skills: Pre-reading and writing, collaboration, creative expression, role-play
**Materials: Airplanes, loose parts for runways, small symbolic play characters, garbage trucks, other load bearing trucks. Rationale: To connect the scenarios of airplanes with other cargo trucks. To practice hand-eye coordination and part-whole relationships while creating roads, bridges, and other structures.
Skills: Communication, collaboration, role-play, symbolic representation, balance, coordination, cause and effect

Science/Dramatic Play
**Materials: woodland animals, natural materials. Rationale: provide the raw material for exploration of the themes of animal habitats as winter comes to a close. Skills: vocabulary (woodland animals, bears, beavers, hibernation, lair) awareness of change of seasons, storytelling, and creative symbolic representation (cave building materials)

Math and Manipulatives

**Materials: round, square, and long objects in colors of purple, blue, and yellow; sorting box. Rationale: To promote classification and grouping skills by sorting by color and shape. Skills: matching, sorting, color and shape identification.
**Materials: cones labeled 1-4 with numbers and place holders, small wooden blocks to place on the appropriate squares. Rationale: To promote the mathematical concept of number correspondence with amount, one to one correspondence, ordering.
**Materials: large and small "pill shaped" tubes Rationale: Fine motor work, sorting and color matching. Skills: shape awareness, classification, fine motor
**Materials: Puzzles of airplanes, woodland animals, birds. Rationale: encourage part-whole thinking, visual discrimination and fine motor control while relating to classroom themes.
**Materials: Seriation Blocks, Skills: seriation, balance.
**Materials: Peg builders. Rationale: provide an early small material construction experience with pegs and boards which are easily connected. Skills: persistence, fine motor, hand strength, motor planning, creativity as well as following model and directions.

Language and Literacy

**Materials: Name cards, Books on spring, wind, magnets, new babies, toileting, alphabet, firefighters, and story books, Environmental print and symbols including emergency symbols and airline logos. 
Rationale: To encourage pre-literacy skills, development of vocabulary relative to classroom theme areas, and create awareness of letters by singing about our names and the letters in our names. To facilitate discussion of print and word meanings. 
Skills: Literacy, communication, letter awareness, listening, turn-taking, letter names, understanding of symbols as conveying meaning.

Blocks

**Materials: large red brick blocks, small red brick blocks, unit blocks, fire trucks, airplanes, trucks, half-circle tunnel shapes, flat planks.
Rationale: To promote the use of blocks to construct roads, tunnels, bridges, and building. To provide a medium for practicing hand-eye coordination, motor planning, balance, construction, and engineering skills. Skills: Inquiry, symbolic representation, large and fine motor, creative expression, understanding of gravity and mass.

Large Motor

**Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge Rationale: To provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges. Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills

Large Group

**Materials: Books about spring, where animals sleep, airplane song, name cards with letter song (I know a girl and her name is Betty, B-E-T-T-Y). Rationale: To bring awareness to the change in seasons. To promote letter and name awareness. To support the development of rhythm, pitch, and patterning. Skills: Sequencing, turn-taking, follow directions, communication, listening, attention span, musical awareness.

Music/Movement

**Materials: new drums, maracas, piano, sandpaper blocks, movement ribbons and scarves.
Rationale: To promote sound experimentation by exploring different instruments. To experiment with volume and tone. To connect sound to the sense of hearing. To encourage movement to music and promote dance as a form of creative expression. 
Skills: imitation, communication, sense awareness, creative expression, beat and tone awareness

Snacks: snacks will be announced as soon as possible!

Overview: Only one week into our Spring Session and the children are already creatively exploring and engaging in new learning tasks. Additionally, the class has begun building relationships with our three new student teachers, Elizabeth A., Hamdi, and Brittany. This week we will continue our exploration of seeds and plant growth, both with our seed sorting and with the observation of our new classroom plant (a daffodil). The science area will also see the addition of some different fruits and vegetables that the children can examine before we cut them open to examine the seeds inside and to make some guacamole for our classroom snack. We have also been discussing a change in our dramatic play area. As we finish up with the post office, the children have given us many ideas for possible changes including a restaurant, theater, bakery, and a pirate ship. We will keep you updated as we get closer to a new pretend play idea.

Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: primary color paint at the easel, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, natural collage materials, watercolors, eye droppers
•Rationale: to explore new tools and media with hands and eyes, promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships and communication skills as children work on collaborative and individual projects
•Skills: creativity, artistic expression, fine motor development (strength, coordination), sharing ideas and materials, symbolic representation, color recognition
•Materials: Clay, hammers, clay knives, craft sticks, pencils, toothpicks
•Rationale: to promote sensory awareness and provide both a creative and social opportunity for children as they increase their fine motor skills. To begin representing ideas and objects in a 3-D medium. Additionally, the children can begin saving their clay creations, working on them for several days, and drying them out to create a permanent art object.
•Skills: sensory input, symbolic representation, observation, sharing materials, and fine motor development (strength, coordination)

Sensory
•Materials: water, soap/bubbles, rotary egg beaters, whisks, measuring pitchers, mixing bowls
•Rationale: to allow encourage experimentation with soap and water and the processes that create bubbles. To facilitate imaginative play including cooking, making potions, and washing dishes.
•Skills: sensory input/developing an awareness of senses, observation of physical changes, creative thinking, fine motor, knowledge of physical properties/cause and effect, comparison, symbolic representation, sharing materials.

Science
•Materials: at the table: assorted seeds, pictures of plants and flowers, tweezers, sorting tray, books on seeds and plants, daffodil plant, avocadoes, limes, tomatoes, notebooks, pencils, magnifying glasses
in the cave: multi-link cubes for plant and flower making, images of different plants for inspiration
•Rationale: to build awareness of plants and growing through the investigation of plants in different states: seeds, growing flower, fruits with seeds inside. To compare the plants in their different stages including their texture, size, color, and shape.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, sorting, exploring transitional changes, investigation of the natural world, documenting change over time.
• Materials: Overhead projector, solid shapes (geometrical shapes, wire of varying thicknesses) for making shadows, a large white sheet for projecting, books on shadow and light.
•Rationale: to deepen our exploration of shadow shapes to shadow transformation, to explore lines and how they can make different shapes, to connect shape with the materials that make different shadows, to explore what does and does not make a shadow.
•Skills: Observing size and shapes, critical thinking skills, observation of the properties of light, creativity, symbolic representation.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: post office station props (large mailbox, mailbags, postal service uniforms, packages, letters, stamps), writing supplies (paper, envelopes, alphabet stampers, markers, pictures of students), housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric, shoes, accessories such as keys, cell phones, necklaces, purses.
•Rationale: to continue supporting the children's interest in the mail delivery process while promoting social interaction, the expression of inventive ideas, and the exploration of how individuals perform jobs in our community
•Skills: creative role-play, making connections to real-life experiences, strengthening home-school connections, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation, literacy

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: Blokus, Boggle Jr., crayons and notepad for Boggle word writing, Perfection, interlocking puzzles, shape/fraction puzzles
•Rationale: to introduce children to games with rules that relate to print awareness, numeral recognition, and knowledge of shape. To introduce children to simple ways to identify and describe shapes and to create new shapes from smaller shapes.
•Skills: print awareness, part-whole relationships, shape recognition and matching, shape combination, spatial awareness, one-to-one correspondence, turn-taking, social skills.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: a large mailbox, individual mail "slots" for each child, pictures of children in the classroom, picture/name cards, alphabet stamps, a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, stickers, staplers, tape
•Rationale: to encourage children in the letter writing process, name recognition, and letter awareness. to provide children with the tools needed to draw or write their own letters and to communicate with peers and teachers through writing.
•Skills: awareness of print, connecting speech to print and print to speech, letter recognition, pre-writing, receptive language, fine motor, creative expression, social interaction, awareness of others, community building

Library
•Materials: familiar favorites along with new books about seeds, spring, babies, and mail delivery
•Rationale: to support pre-literacy skills, to familiarize children with new books, and to allow for quiet time in the classroom, to use books as resources for non-fiction information
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, awareness of print, listening, community building

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, unit blocks, multi-colored shape blocks, small wooden cube blocks, small wooden rods, steering wheels, paper and pencils
•Rationale: To foster current dramatic play themes, to encourage planful and purposeful approaches to building, to combine different materials in order to create new structures, to allow for individual building and collaborative work
•Skills: large motor development, dramatic play, creating imaginary scenarios, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking

Large Motor
Gym
Materials: climbing ladders, monkey bars, notch blocks, climber with donut slide, A-frame with ladder bridge

•Rationale: to provide more climbing challenges along with opportunities for risk taking. The notch blocks will allow the children to creatively build their own designs for motor challenges.

•Skills: climbing, upper and lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, depth perception, physical risk taking, construction skills * Look for additions later in the week!
Playground
•Materials: shovels, scoops, buckets, dishes for dramatic play
•Rationale: As the snow slowly melts, the children will explore digging in wet sand, mud, and snow, creating opportunities for social interaction, cooperation, and role play.
•Skills: upper and lower body strength, physical fitness, perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness), building community through social interactions.

Special Interest
Elizabeth will lead large group for the next week, and use this community time to discuss our classroom plant's growth, changes to our dramatic play area, and the possible arrival of some new classroom pets. We will also explore seeds as we cut open avocadoes, limes, and tomatoes to make guacamole for a snack.

Snack
Monday: Rice cakes and applesauce
Wednesday: Alphabet soup and crackers
Thursday: Guacamole and tortilla chips
*** All snacks are served with milk and water unless otherwise noted

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