Recently in Elizabeth's Weekly Plans F11 Category

Overview: It is hard to believe that the school year is almost over! However, when I think of all of the amazing learning and growing that have happened in our classroom, it is also hard to imagine that it all could happen over just a few months. This week, we will continue to offer new learning experiences to support and encourage the children's exploration. Bubbles as well as bubble-making tools (egg beaters, whisks) are added to the sensory table to provide a novel sensory experience as well as create a challenging extension of the children's "fish catching" play from last week. Additionally, the eagle's nest is removed from the nook area to provide extra room for the children's recent interest in castle building. Both collage materials as well as block-building sets are added to extend the imaginitve constructive play.

Sensory (water table)

• Materials: water, aquatic animal figurines, glass gems, aquarium nets, bubble solution, egg beaters, whisks

• Rationale: To extend symbolic play with plastic fish by creating a "hunt" in bubbles.

• Skills: symbolic representation, storytelling/dramatic play,
upper-body/hand strength, opportunities for
cooperation/collaboration/negotiation



Math and Manipulatives

•Materials: puzzles, alphabet puzzles, Extra large Geo-Boards (rubber band boards), Problem-Solving Triangle Brain Teaser, "Perfection" shape matching game.

•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes, and allow them to create their own shapes using rubber bands on the geo-boards. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides). Extra large geo-boards are added this week to expand children's shape-making.

•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks


•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, peg people, Castle-related picture books, crowns, capes, dresses, tunics. Nook Area: Cardboard boxes, collage materials, "No-Ends" building set.
•Rationale: In addition to children's ongoing interest in creating vehicles and homes, items and books support the building of "Castle" structures. To support children's interest in fantasy castle play and encorporate dramatic play and construction activities.

•Skills: Large motor development, creative expression, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play

•Materials: Loose parts (to represent candy), paper, pencils, tickets (pretend money), aprons, chef hats, oven mits, various cooking utensils, chalkboard sign, chalk.

•Rationale: To encourage exploration with a variety of roles, to explore familiar experiences (i.e. going to the store), To explore jobs in the community and what it takes to perform them. To use creativity and imagination to transform loose parts into different objects.

•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, creative story-telling, knowledge of jobs in the community, literacy and numeracy experience.

Expressive Art

•Materials: Sand, trays, collage materials.

•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, to create artistic images using new materials, to bring together the children's interests in both 2-D art and collage using sand trays.

•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, creative storytelling, hand-eye coordination, creative problem solving.

Science

•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rat, paper for recording.

•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage deeper thought about living things and care-taking by interacting with our classroom rat through feeding, handling, and observing

•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, making predictions.



Language and Literacy

•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, samples of written words, a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards, Blank paper books, Rubber alphabet stamps and ink pads, computer and keyboard 

•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers. To emphasize a variety of purposes for writing, including storytelling (fiction and nonfiction). To encorporate use of technology into the writing experience by offering word processing software.

•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways, use of technology in a variety of ways

•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that support our continued discussion of feelings and emotions, plants, and creative storytelling.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
Materials: stepping pyramid, climb and jump, balance beam, monkey bars, slide, rope climb up the bumpy ramp, wall ladder, scooters
Rationale: To support and develop upper body strength and core muscles. To provide challenging activities that foster their muscular and cardiovascular endurance. 
Skills: upper body strength, motor coordination, hand eye coordination, propulsion skills, balance, depth perception, visual perception, lower body strength, turn taking, dynamic balance

Overview: Although this school year is nearing its end, the learning continues to develop and expand in our classroom. Recently, the children have begun storytelling through both the written word and dramatic play. This week, different dress-up clothes are added to the block area to support the children's interest in knights, princesses, heroes, and "rescuing." Our dramatic play candy shop also continues to provide the children with dramatic play opportunities as they pretend to make, sell, and buy different treats. This has also offered a literacy component as the children create signs for the store. This week, the children will create a menu for the restaurant, incorporating both literacy and numeracy into the candy shop theme.

Sensory (water table)

• Materials: water, aquatic animal figurines, glass gems, rocks, small
containers with lids

• Rationale: In order to extend the children's strong interest in
symbolic play and dramatic story creation, especially with animals, we
will bring in the water table and add some new water-related toys.

• Skills: symbolic representation, storytelling/dramatic play,
upper-body/hand strength, opportunities for
cooperation/collaboration/negotiation



Math and Manipulatives

•Materials: puzzles, alphabet puzzles, Geo-Boards (rubber band boards), Problem-Solving Triangle Brain Teaser, "Perfection" shape matching game.

•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes, and allow them to create their own shapes using rubber bands on the geo-boards. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides). To introduce non-traditional shapes in the "Perfection" game and practice describing new and unfamilar shape attributes.

•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks


•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, peg people, Castle-related picture books, crowns, capes, dresses, tunics
•Rationale: In addition to children's ongoing interest in creating vehicles and homes, items and books are added to support the building of "Castle" structures. To support children's interest in fantasy castle play and encorporate dramatic play and construction activites.

•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play

•Materials: Loose parts (to represent candy), paper, pencils, tickets (pretend money), aprons, chef hats, oven mits, various cooking utensils.

•Rationale: To encourate exploration with a variety of roles, to explore familiar experiences (i.e. going to the store), To explore jobs in the community and what it takes to perform them. To use creativity and imagination to transform loose parts into different objects.

•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, creative story-telling, knowledge of jobs in the community, literacy and numeracy experience.

Expressive Art

•Materials: paint and shape cookie cutters at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, glue, tape, yarn, pipe cleaners, construction paper shapes, shape outlines to support cutting.

•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To support continued exploration with shapes and the shapes we see in our everyday lives, To emphasize the properties of shapes and how they can be combined, To emphasize artistic principles of line, pattern, and texture.

•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of shapes, part whole relationships, hand-eye coordination, creative problem solving.
Science

•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rats, computer, magnifying glasses, planting materials (dirt, egg cartons, seeds), spray bottles, paper for recording.

•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To continue to observe familiar natural experiences (classroom pets) while extending ideas about these phenomena. To extend our exploration of living things by planting seedlings that we can care for, observe, and eventually transfer outdoors. To offer opportunities to chart the growth of plants and observe how living things can change over time.

•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information, making predictions.



Language and Literacy

•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, and a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards, Blank paper books, Rubber alphabet stamps and ink pads, computer and keyboard

•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers. To emphasize a variety of purposes for writing, including storytelling (fiction and nonfiction). To encorporate use of technology into the writing experience by offering word processing software.

•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways, use of technology in a variety of ways

•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that support our continued discussion of feelings and emotions, plants, and shapes.

•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.

•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor

Materials: stepping pyramid, climb and jump, balance beam, monkey bars, slide, rope climb up the bumpy ramp, wall ladder, scooters

Rationale: To support and develop upper body strength and core muscles. To provide challenging activities that foster their muscular and cardiovascular endurance. 
Skills: upper body strength, motor coordination, hand eye coordination, propulsion skills, balance, depth perception, visual perception, lower body strength, turn taking, dynamic balance

Snacks
Monday: Applesauce and Whole Wheat Toast
Wednesday: Cooking Project
Thursday: Noodles (eaten with chopsticks)

Overview: Small groups have begun, bringing additional attention to the three topics of gardening, birds, and letters. In addition to discussing these topics during small groups, we will continue to focus on these aspects of the curriculum in our classroom throughout the day. The seeds we have planted indoors (wheat grass, bell peppers, corn) have all begun to sprout and grow. The children continue to reflect on what the plants need to help them grow, and often stop by to give the seedlings a spray of water and observe the changes that have happened each day. In order to support the children's growing interest in the alphabet, letter stamps are added to the writing center. Additionally, blank paper books are also available to support the children's growing interest in storytelling. Adults will take dictation as children tell imaginative tales, create colorful illustrations, or use cut-out pictures to bring their stories to life. Shapes and geometry also continue to be a source of interest and exploration. Shape cookie cutters are placed at the easel to encourage shape-stamping. Finally, we continue enjoying the Spring weather outdoors, taking advantage of the fresh green grass as we engage in games with rules, such as Red Light, Green Light, Freeze Tag, Hide and Go Seek, and many others.

Sensory (water table)
• Materials: water, aquatic animal figurines, glass gems, rocks, small
containers with lids
• Rationale: In order to extend the children's strong interest in
symbolic play and dramatic story creation, especially with animals, we
will bring in the water table and add some new water-related toys.
• Skills: symbolic representation, storytelling/dramatic play,
upper-body/hand strength, opportunities for
cooperation/collaboration/negotiation

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, tanagrams, geometric puzzles, alphabet puzzles, shape magnets and magnet board, Geo-Boards (rubber band boards)
•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes, and allow them to create their own shapes using rubber bands on the geo-boards. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides) as well as introduce the idea that certain shapes can be combined to create other shapes. To emphasize part-whole relationships while offering letter-recognition opportunities.
•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), paper and pencils, laminated pictures of different house features (windows, address numbers, etc).
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. To extend last week's investigation of "rat playgrounds" and encourage children to think creatively about how best to support the exploration of our classroom pets. This will help facilitate cooperation and idea sharing, whilc children hypothesize how to keep the rats safe, contained, and happy.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, baby books, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Wooden farms set (in caves), "Farm" felt-board images.
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To continue the children's interest in symbolic representation by allowing them to create stories about both farm animals and the farmers who care for them. To extend our new interest in planting and growing by providing the opportunity to imagine the ways farmers plant and grow food. * In order to ensure that the children's rich imaginitve play scenarious continue to grow and develop, we will discuss possible new set-up in the dramatic play area. In conjunction with the morning class, we will work together to decide upon what new materials we can include in the dramatic play areas, and what we can pretend to be (doctors?, Candy Shop Employees?, Farmers?) Check back in later this week to see what the children have chosen.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, creative story-telling, knowledge of jobs in the community.

Expressive Art
•Materials: paint and shape cookie cutters at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, yarn, pipe cleaners, construction paper shapes, shape outlines to support cutting.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To support continued exploration with shapes and the shapes we see in our everyday lives, To emphasize the properties of shapes and how they can be combined, To emphasize artistic principles of line, pattern, and texture.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of shapes, part whole relationships, hand-eye coordination, creative problem solving.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rats, computer, magnifying glasses, planting materials (dirt, egg cartons, seeds), spray bottles, paper for recording.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To continue to observe familiar natural experiences (classroom pets) while extending ideas about these phenomena. To extend our exploration of living things by planting seedlings that we can care for, observe, and eventually transfer outdoors. To offer opportunities to chart the growth of plants and observe how living things can change over time.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information, making predictions.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, and a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards, Blank paper books, Rubber alphabet stamps and ink pads.
•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers. To emphasize a variety of purposes for writing, including storytelling (fiction and nonfiction).
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that support our continued discussion of feelings and emotions, plants, and shapes.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
Materials: stepping pyramid, climb and jump, balance beam, monkey bars, slide, rope climb up the bumpy ramp, wall ladder, scooters
Rationale: To support and develop upper body strength and core muscles. To provide challenging activities that foster their muscular and cardiovascular endurance.
Skills: upper body strength, motor coordination, hand eye coordination, propulsion skills, balance, depth perception, visual perception, lower body strength, turn taking, dynamic balance

Snacks
*Monday: Boiled Eggs and Graham Crackers
*Wednesday: Alphabet Soup
*Thursday: Oatmeal Crackers and Cucumbers

Overview: The session is in full swing, and now we are also in full SPRING! This week, gardening activities will be highlighted, including cutting up fruits in the search for seeds, planting different types of seeds, and thinking about what items we may want to have in our outdoor garden. In conjunction with our interest in gardening, farm sets are made available in the cave. This will give the children the opportunity to explore planting and growing food using their imagination and symbolic representation. Our exploration of shapes also continues as we search for shapes in the world around us and create artwork using a variety of shape cut-outs.

Sensory
•Materials: sand, pvc pipes, shovels, spoons, seashells, wooden beams.
•Rationale: To investigate the properties of sand while acting out a familiar experience: Building, laying pipes, etc. Seashells are added to facilitate burying and finding activities and provide children with the opportunity to discuss their own experiences with seashells (i.e. recent trips to the beach) while using descriptive vocabulary (bumpy, spotted, shiney, etc). We will continue to support recent symbolic play related to train track building using a variety of loose parts. This will be our last week of using the sand table for the year, so the children will be encouraged to try their final building ideas out before we switch to a new sensory table.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, expressive language, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, tanagrams, geometric puzzles, alphabet puzzles, shape magnets and magnet board, Geo-Boards (rubber band boards)
•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes, and allow them to create their own shapes using rubber bands on the geo-boards. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides) as well as introduce the idea that certain shapes can be combined to create other shapes. To emphasize part-whole relationships while offering letter-recognition opportunities.
•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), paper and pencils.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. To extend last week's investigation of "rat playgrounds" and encourage children to think creatively about how best to support the exploration of our classroom pets. This will help facilitate cooperation and idea sharing, whilc children hypothesize how to keep the rats safe, contained, and happy.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, baby books, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Wooden farms set (in caves), "Farm" felt-board images.
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To continue the children's interest in symbolic representation by allowing them to create stories about both farm animals and the farmers who care for them. To extend our new interest in planting and growing by providing the opportunity to imagine the ways farmers plant and grow food.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, creative story-telling, knowledge of jobs in the community.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, yarn, pipe cleaners, construction paper shapes.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To support continued exploration with shapes and the shapes we see in our everyday lives.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of shapes, part whole relationships, hand-eye coordination, creative problem solving.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rats, computer, magnifying glasses, planting materials (dirt, egg cartons, seeds)
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To continue to observe familiar natural experiences (classroom pets) while extending ideas about these phenomena. To extend our exploration of living things by planting seedlings that we can care for, observe, and eventually transfer outdoors.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information, making predictions.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, and a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards.
•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that support our continued discussion of feelings and emotions, plants, and shapes.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
Gym: Materials: Jump-the-gap, basketball, rolling slide, hopscotch, pitch-back, ladders, and monkey bars.
Rationale: After focusing on balance during the last gym set-up, we decided to arrange the equipment to provide new challenges emphasizing jumping and dynamic movement, throwing and catching, and target practice.
Skills: Depth-perception, static and dynamic jumping, throwing/catching, hand-eye coordination, visual-perception, hopping on one foot, upper-arm strength, climbing, coordination, and core-strength.

Special Announcements:
*Check out volunteer sign-up for in-classroom participation opportunities
*Don't forget the Spring Soiree is this Saturday. Look for the amazing flower pots painted by our class!
Snacks
*Monday: Sunbutter Sandwiches and Bell Peppers
*Wednesday: Classmade Applesauce and Cinnamon whole wheat tortillas
*Thursday: Yogurt and granola

Overview: The first week of the spring session was full of excitement and exploration. This week we will continue to support the growing interest in living things, including the eagles and rats, by supporting the ongoing building of animal homes in the clay area. We will also begin discussing another kind of living things: plants. We will begin to germinate some seeds indoors and discuss our plans for what we would like to grow on our playground garden. Additionally, the children's ongoing interest in building and constructing will be supported both in the classroom and on the playground. A woodworking station has been added to the playground which will enable the children work on sawing, hammering, and drilling in a supervised manner. Nest building will also be continued on a larger scale using blocks and sticks in our classroom nook. Finally, our investigation of patterns last session has led into interest in geometrical shapes. This week, much of our large group time will be building awareness of the properties of different shapes and how you can make and identify them.

Sensory
•Materials: sand, pvc pipes, shovels, spoons, seashells, wooden beams.
•Rationale: To investigate the properties of sand while acting out a familiar experience: Building, laying pipes, etc. Seashells are added to facilitate burying and finding activities and provide children with the opportunity to discuss their own experiences with seashells (i.e. recent trips to the beach) while using descriptive vocabulary (bumpy, spotted, shiney, etc). We will continue to support recent symbolic play related to train track building using a variety of loose parts.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, expressive language, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, tanagrams, geometric puzzles, alphabet puzzles, shape magnets and magnet board.
•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides) as well as introduce the idea that certain shapes can be combined to create other shapes. To emphasize part-whole relationships while offering letter-recognition opportunities.
•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), paper and pencils, laminated pictures of different house features (windows, address numbers, etc), notch blocks, sticks, fabric, ribbons
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. The unit blocks will be displayed to highlight concepts of geometrical properties. To allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To support children as they expand their interest in creating realistic houses with blocks and other open-ended building materials by including images of different house features. In the nook area, notch blocks, sticks, ribbons, and fabric are provided to support further nest building activities on a lareger scale.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, baby books, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Mailbox, Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships. To support deeper reflection on care-giving activities and animal care stimulated by the birth of baby rats and the video of the eagle's nest. Books about babies and families have been added to the baby cave in order to emphasize what different families look like and how people care for babies.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, emergent literacy.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, yarn, pipecleaners, and beads, flower pots.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To encourage open-ended exploration and problem solving as children engage with novel natural materials and discover new ways to create works of art. Flower pots are included as painting projects that will jumpstart our classroom planting activities.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture, creative problem solving.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rats, computer, nests, magnifying glasses, planting materials (dirt, egg cartons, seeds)
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To continue to observe familiar natural experiences (classroom pets, birds' nests) while extending ideas about these phenomena. Begin to think about the different materials used to create nests, to hypothesize about animal homes. To enxtend our exploration of living things by planting seedlings that we can care for, observe, and eventually transfer outdoors.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information, making predictions.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox, and a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards.
•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that highlight the new season, Spring.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
• Materials: Gym: Materials: Jump-the-gap, basketball, rolling slide, hopscotch, pitch-back, ladders, and monkey bars.
Rationale: After focusing on balance during the last gym set-up, we decided to arrange the equipment to provide new challenges emphasizing jumping and dynamic movement, throwing and catching, and target practice.
Skills: Depth-perception, static and dynamic jumping, throwing/catching, hand-eye coordination, visual-perception, hopping on one foot, upper-arm strength, climbing, coordination, and core-strength.

Special Announcements:
*Check out volunteer sign-up for in-classroom participation opportunities

Snacks
*Monday: Slice cucumber and chex
*Wednesday: Class cooking project- Whole Wheat Soft Pretzels
*Thursday: Cantaloupe and graham crackers

Overview: Welcome back to school! Spring is here, and we are excited to continue exploring and investigating the world around us. We continue to extend our exploration of nests, inspired by the eagle's nests we have been observing. This session we hope to think more deeply about the different types of animals that create nests, as well as animal habitats as a whole. After our exciting exploration of patterning, we are shifting our focus to geometry and shapes. We will explore the properties of different shapes and discuss symmetry, angles, and spatial relationships. Natural materials continue to be available in the art area to facilitate creative exploration and self-expression. It is going to be a busy and exciting Spring!

Sensory
•Materials: sand, pvc pipes, shovels, spoons, seashells, wooden beams.
•Rationale: To investigate the properties of sand while acting out a familiar experience: Building, laying pipes, etc. Seashells are added to facilitate burying and finding activities and provide children with the opportunity to discuss their own experiences with seashells (i.e. recent trips to the beach) while using descriptive vocabulary (bumpy, spotted, shiny, etc)
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, expressive language, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, tanagrams, geometric puzzles, Alphabet puzzles, shape magnets and magnet board.
•Rationale: To encourage children to begin exploring with different shapes. To facilitate discussion of the properties of different shapes (including angles and sides) as well as introduce the idea that certain shapes can be combined to create other shapes. To emphasize part-whole relationships while offering letter-recognition opportunities.
•Skills: letter recognition, shape identification, part-whole relationships, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, geometry vocabulary (sides, angles).

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), paper and pencils.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. The unit blocks will be displayed to highlight concepts of geometrical properties. To allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, baby books, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Mailbox, Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships. To support deeper reflection on care-giving activities and animal care stimulated by the birth of baby rats and the video of the eagle's nest. Books about babies and families have been added to the baby cave in order to emphasize what different families look like and how people care for babies.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation, emergent literacy.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, yarn, pipecleaners, and beads.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To encourage open-ended exploration and problem solving as children engage with novel natural materials and discover new ways to create works of art.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture, creative problem solving.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Rats, computer, nests, magnifying glasses.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To continue to observe familiar natural experiences (classroom pets, birds' nests) while extending ideas about these phenomena. Begin to think about the different materials used to create nests, to hypothesize about animal homes.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information, making predictions.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox, and a book of the children's names and pictures. Magnetic upper- and lower-case letters and magnet boards.
•Rationale: To continue to support children as they engage in letter and note writing. To provide opportunities to become familiar with combining letters in different and novel ways. To encourage peer collaboration and communication through creating words together and writing the names of peers.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, phonological awareness, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that highlight the new season, Spring.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To become familiar with a variety of stories and genres.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
• Materials: Gym: To be announced

Special Announcements:
*Welcome back! Please remember we will be reverting to our schedule from the beginning of the year. We will begin the day in the classroom and end the day on the playground.

Snacks
*Monday: Popsicles and Milk. Happy Birthday Meryl!
*Wednesday: Oranges and Animal Crackers
*Thursday: Edamame and Triscuits

Overview: Our classroom continues to be filled with excitement and exploration this week. We will carry on our ongoing exploration of growth, change, and measurement. The Amaryllis plant has now bloomed and is so large that we have begun measuring it with larger hollow blocks. We are now able to view the baby rats more closely and are measuring them with the unifix cubes and recording what we find on clipboards. We are continuing to use technology to extend our investigation into growth and new life by including the live-feed of an eagle's nest in our science area computer. We have observed two eagles in the nest so far, and have found it exciting to predict if and when eggs will arrive. The children continue to write letters and stories in the language area, and to extend the story writing, pre-made books are included with the writing materials. Additionally, the children continue to notice patterns on their clothing and we have extended the idea of patterning by using vocal patterns at large group (High, low, etc.). The children have observed the patterns at the easel and have been adding these ideas into their paintings as well.

Sensory
•Materials: sand, various containers, measuring cups, measuring spoons, charts to document measurement findings, construction vehicles, PVC pipes, cardboard, popsicle sticks.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of sand by exploring ways to measure sand. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, and idea sharing. To include interesting and novel materials and give the children a chance to explore the idea of measuring volume and documenting what they find. To extend children's construction of buildings by adding pieces to allow the children to build structures.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, unifix cubes and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, patterning mosaic boards with patterning, opposite matching cards, sequencing game.
•Rationale: To encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting concepts such as patterning, measuring, sequence, and numeral recognition. To continue to highlight the skill of patterning, while giving children the opportunity to create and record different patterns. To extend the concept of measurement using a standardized unit of measurement (unifix cubes) while giving children continued experience with counting and one-to-one correspondence.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, measuring.

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), and marble tubes with marbles, mobiloes building set, open-ended props for emergency vehicle play.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. The unit blocks will be displayed to highlight concepts of geometrical properties as well as patterning. To allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by providing materials that can extend their current interest in vehicle creation, especially emergency vehicle play.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Mailbox with mail carrier uniforms and letter bags. Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To connect writing activities, letter, and word recognition with dramatic and social play. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships. To support deeper reflection on care-giving activities and animal care stimulated by the birth of baby rats and the video of the eagle's nest.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel, clay, tools to cut the clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, popsicle sticks, carpet squares, large cardboard squares, pattern examples (geometric patterns, peacock feathers, spirals, etc)
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To encourage the molding of creative ideas and representational objects. To continue the ongoing exploration of collage by using a variety of materials with different properties and textures, including carpet and wood. To extend the social and collaborative nature of art by encouraging a group art project, placing the several individual carpet collages on a communal mural. To highlight the concept of patterning as well as geometric awareness by providing images of different types of patterns for inspiration. To highlight new ways to interact with clay and encourage more 3 dimensional sculpting.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture, creative problem solving, patterning, shape-identification.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Mother Rat and 12 babies, clipboards, flower bulb and differently sized plants, unifix cubes, computer, nests.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage inquiry into the concepts of growth and development by using observation and measurement to note the changes in living things: i.e. plants, rats, etc. To encourage children to make connections between different living things.
•Skills: observation, measurement, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words and letters, mailbox, a book of the children's names and pictures, and pre-made books.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to extend the creation of their own stories, writings, and books. Name cards are added to encourage familiarity with letters, writing, and to enable children to copy the names of their peers to use in "mailing letters." To connect writing to social and dramatic play activities by adding a mailbox to dramatic play as a place for children to place their writings.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition, phonological awareness, conventions of print, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that highlight the alphabet and numerals. Books about fairy tales and nursery rhymes are also available to encourage continued exploration of familiar stories.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To use familiar texts as a means of predicting and comparing and contrasting different tales.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.
Large Motor
- Materials: Gym - soccer balls and net, balance beam, rope swing, climbing structure, stairs and balance beam.
- Rationale: The new rope swing will provide opportunities to enhance grasping abilities, upper body strength, motor coordination and timing, as well as propulsion skills. Balance beams in the gym will allow children to practice balance, climbing, and their risk taking abilities. Visual perception, propulsion, and depth perception will all be utilized as children engage in kicking soccer balls into the net.
- Skills: Depth perception, grasping, visual perception, risk taking, motor coordination and timing, propulsion skills, construction skills, dynamic balance and coordination, upper and lower body strength, and climbing.

Special Announcements:
*This is the final week of conferences. I look forward to meeting with all of the families this week.
*Don't forget to check out our volunteer sheet on the classroom door, volunteer slots are filling up quickly!
*April will be lead teaching this week.

Snacks

Monday: Grapefruit and Graham Crackers
Wednesday: Apple Cookies and Milk
Thursday: Carrots, Celery, and Hummus

Overview: Our classroom continues to be filled with excitement and exploration this week. We will carry on our ongoing exploration of growth and change. This is highlighted by both our Amaryllis plant (which is now 22 blocks tall and looking like it might bloom any day!) and the baby rats (which are growing quickly). This week, we will use technology to extend our investigation into growth and new life by including a live-feed of an eagle's nest in our science area computer. We will connect this to our observations of the newborn rats and the ways different animals can grow, as well as how they care for their young. Additionally, the children's interest in patterns continues to persist, and the clothing patterns they wore to school last week helped to highlight the visual and creative possibilitiies involved in patterning. To help support this interest, images of geometric and natural patterns are displayed in the easel area to foster creativity and deeper understanding of repetitive patterns. We are also entering our third week of small groups, and each group is moving from awareness of their topic into deeper exploration and inquiry related to vehicles, sculpture, and measurement, respectively.

Sensory
•Materials: sand, various containers, measuring cups, measuring spoons, charts to document measurement findings.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of sand by exploring ways to measure sand. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, and idea sharing. To include interesting and novel materials and give the children a chance to explore the idea of measuring volume and documenting what they find.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, unifix cubes and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, patterning mosiac boards with patterning.
•Rationale: To encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting concepts such as patterning, measuring, and numeral recognition. To continue to highlight the skill of patterning, while giving children the opportunity to create and record different patterns. To extend the concept of measurement using a standardized unit of measurement (unifix cubes) while giving children continued experience with counting and one-to-one correspondence.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, measuring.

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), and marble tubes with marbles, mobiloes building set, open-ended props for emergency vehicle play.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills. The unit blocks will be displayed to highlight concepts of geometrical properties as well as patterning. To allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by providing materials that can extend their current interest in vehicle creation, especially emergency vehicle play.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, reflecting on and interpreting previous experiences, social problem-solving, and fine motor development.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Mailbox with mail carrier uniforms and letter bags. Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To connect writing activities, letter, and word recognition with dramatic and social play. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships. To support deeper reflection on care-giving activities and animal care stimulated by the birth of baby rats and the video of the eagle's nest.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, imagination, social problem solving, and symbolic representation.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials and tiles for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, popsicle sticks, carpet squares, large cardboard squares, pattern examples (geometric patterns, peacock feathers, spirals, etc)
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To continue the ongoing exploration of collage by using a variety of materials with different properties and textures, including carpet and wood. To extend the social and collaborative nature of art by encouraging a group art project, placing the several individual carpet collages on a communal mural. To highlight the concept of patterning as well as geometric awareness by providing images of different types of patterns for inspiration.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture, creative problem solving, patterning, shape-identification.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Momma Rat and 12 babies, flower bulb and differently sized plants, unifix cubes, computer, nests.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage inquiry into the concepts of growth and development by using observation and measurement to note the changes in living things: i.e. plants, rats, etc. To encourage children to make connections between different living things.
•Skills: observation, measurement, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time, using technology as a source of information.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox, and a book of the children's names and pictures.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Name cards are added to encourage familiarity with letters, writing, and to enable children to copy the names of their peers to use in "mailing letters." To connect writing to social and dramatic play activities by adding a mailbox to dramatic play as a place for children to place their writings.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to offer fiction and nonfiction texts, including those that highlight the alphabet and numerals. Books about fairy tales and nursery rhymes are also available to encourage continued exploration of familiar stories. •Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. To encourage the use of books as a source of information. To use familiar texts as a means of predicting and comparing and contrasting different tales.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, predicting, listening, phonological awareness, and community building.

Large Motor
• Materials: Gym: climbing wall, race track, tricycles, slide-climber with large donut and triangle-slide, jumping hurdles
• Rationale: We are excited about the new gym set up! Last week we moved the mats to the middle of the gym and created a racetrack (complete with "tunnel"). The addition of tricycles will allow the children to work on their lower body strength and coordination, which is often difficult in the winter months. On the mats, we replaced the rolling slide with the triangle slide. We will also have jumping hurdles, and a bolster climbing challenge as an alternative to taking the stairs to the slide. We also plan to bring in beanbag/ball tossing games to work on throwing/catching skills with the children. Outside, sledding continues to be a hit, as nearly all the children make their way to the top of the hill every day. However, the wolves and dragons (from the block area) can sometimes be spotted lurking on the playground, as well!
• Skills: lower-body strength/coordination, dynamic/static balance, depth perception, eye-to-hand/eye-to-foot coordination, directional/spatial/temporal awareness, muscular strength and endurance, cardiovascular endurance, upper body strength/coordination, social interactions (turn taking)
Special Announcements:
*Small groups continue this week. Please make sure you discuss the documentation with your children so they can reflect on what they did last week.
*2nd week of conferences!
*Although Valentines Day is next week, we will not celebrate the holiday as a class. Children are welcome to bring notes or letters for their classmates at any time, not just this week, and they can deliver them using our classroom mailbox.

Snacks
*Monday: Oranges and Mini Triscuit
*Wednesday: Rice cakes and carrots
*Thursday: Cucumbers and crackers

Overview: The children's play continues to flourish in many interesting ways as we enter into our sixth week. Cooperative building and idea-sharing continues to thrive in the block area, as the children plan and work together to create different types of vehicles. Last week, the children were introduced to the new classroom pet rat. This week, the children will be able to observe her newborn babies and be able to reflect on their growth and development. The children will also be able to observe the growth of the amaryllis bulb and measure the plant with unifix cubes and graph the growth on a chart. The children are still interested in the patterning items made available in the math area, and they remain available in order to give the children a chance to create more complex patterns. In the dramatic play area, there will be "mail carrier" outfits to extend letter writing and imaginatve play in the classroom.

Sensory
•Materials: sand, various containers, measuring cups, measuring spoons, charts to document measurement findings.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of sand by exploring ways to measure sand. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, and idea sharing. To include interesting and novel materials and give the children a chance to explore the idea of measuring volume and documenting what they find.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, unifix cubes and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, multi-colored stones sorting and patterning games, patterning pegs and pegboards, fruit patterning grids.
•Rationale: To encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning. To extend mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, measuring, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting mathematic concepts such as patterning, measuring, and numeral recognition. To specifically highlight the skill of patterning, so children become aware of how to create or extend increasingly complex patterns. To extend the concept of measurement using a standardized unit of measurement.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, measuring.

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles), and marble tubes with marbles.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry and spatial reasoning, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences, while bringing together block play with current dramatic play interests - most recently, in building and playing in an "airplane" and "house." To extend the rich problem solving play involving marble ramp building.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, social problem-solving, and fine motor development.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed "baby" animals and care items, Mailbox with mail carrier uniforms and letter bags. Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. To connect writing activities, letter, and word recognition with dramatic and social play. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships. To support deeper reflection on care-giving activities and animal care stimulated by the birth of baby rats!
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials and tiles for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, posicle sticks, carpet squares, large cardboard squares.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To continue the ongoing exploration of collage by using differently sized tiles. To extend the social and collaborative nature of art by encouraging a group art project, placing the several individual carpet collages on a communal mural.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, Momma Rat AND 12 BABIES! flower bulb and differently sized plants, unifix cubes.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage inquiry into the concepts of growth and development by using observation and measurement to note the changes in living things: i.e. plants, rats, etc.
•Skills: observation, measurement, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox, and a book of the children's names and pictures.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Name cards are added to encourage familiarity with letters, writing, and to enable children to copy the names of their peers to use in "mailing letters." To connect writing to social and dramatic play activities by adding a mailbox to dramatic play as a place for children to place their writings.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library has been updated with texts to focus on the changes experienced in winter, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals. Books based on animal growth and change have been added.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, measuring, growth, and community building.

Large Motor
• Materials: Gym: climbing wall, race track, tricycles, slide-climber with triangle-slide, jumping hurdles
• Rationale: We are excited about the new gym set up! Last week we moved the mats to the middle of the gym and created a racetrack (complete with "tunnel"). The addition of tricycles will allow the children to work on their lower body strength and coordination, which is often difficult in the winter months. On the mats, we replaced the rolling slide with the triangle slide. We will also have jumping hurdles, and a bolster climbing challenge as an alternative to taking the stairs to the slide. We also plan to bring in beanbag/ball tossing games to work on throwing/catching skills with the children. Outside, sledding continues to be a hit, as nearly all the children make their way to the top of the hill every day. However, the wolves and dragons (from the block area) can sometimes be spotted lurking on the playground, as well!
• Skills: lower-body strength/coordination, dynamic/static balance, depth perception, eye-to-hand/eye-to-foot coordination, directional/spatial/temporal awareness, muscular strength and endurance, cardiovascular endurance, upper body strength/coordination, social interactions (turn taking)

Special Announcements:
*Small groups continue this week. Please make sure you discuss the documentation with your children so they can reflect on what they did last week. If you have any special talents or interests that you think might be helpful to share with the small groups (Vehicles, Sculpture, Measurement), please let a teacher know!
*Conferences begin this week. I look forward to meeting with you all.
*Patterns continue to be a strong interest in our classroom. Please encourage your child to wear clothing that has a pattern on it (stripes, polka dots, flowers, etc) so that we can observe what patterns look like in a different context!

Snacks
*Monday: Bananas and Graham Crackers
*Wednesday: Yogurt Blueberry Popsicles and Rice Cakes
*Thursday: Alphabet Soup and Crackers

Overview: As we enter into our fifth week, the children's interests continue to blossom in many interesting ways. Cooperative building and idea sharing continues to thrive in the block area, as the children plan and work together to create elaborate houses and airplanes. Last week, the children became interested in creating three-dimensional artwork by layering their tile creations and building upwards. This week, small pieces of carpet, popsicle sticks, and new collage materials are made available to extend the collage exploration and encourage divergent thinking regarding building with novel art materials. The children are still interested in the patterning items made available in the math area, so we will keep those to give the children a chance to create more complex patterns. A unifix cube measuring board will also be provided in the math area to introduce the idea of measuring. During group time last week, the children listend to a book about the life cycle of a seed and they had given ideas on what the seed needs to turn into a plant. Thus, in the science area, the children can investigate different sized plants to compare and contrast and record their findings.

Sensory
•Materials: water, various containers, measuring cups, measuring spoons.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of water by exploring ways to measure water. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, and idea sharing. To include interesting and novel materials and give the children a chance to explore the idea of measuring volume.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, unifix cubes and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, multi-colored stones sorting and patterning games, patterning pegs and pegboards, fruit patterning grids.
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, measuring, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting new mathematic concepts such as patterning, measuring, and numeral recognition. To specifically highlight the skill of patterning, so children become aware of how to create or extend increasingly complex patterns. To introduce the concept of measurement using a standardized unit of measurement.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving, measuring.

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (construction vehicles).
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry and spatial reasoning, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences, while bringing together block play with current dramatic play interests - most recently, in building and playing in an "airplane" and "house."
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed animals and animal care items (leashes, food dishes, brushes, etc). The block area is also available for dramatic play (specifically, in the airplane and house the children have built), mailbox. Plastic animals, logs (in the cave).
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. Extend airplane play into imagined journeys, with the rich creative and cognitive ideas, options and information/learning inherent in such play. To connect writing activities with dramatic play. To extend animal play into discussion of Zoo animals, their habitats, and their relationships.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials and tiles for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, long boards for group tile collage, posicle sticks, carpet squares.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To continue the ongoing exploration of collage by using differently sized tiles. To extend the social and collaborative nature of art by offering materials the children could use to construct more complex houses and structures.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, flower bulb, books on growing plants, and pre-grown plants.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage deeper investigation into growth, change, and measurement by watching and caring for a plant in our classroom as it grows from bulb to flowering plant. To introduce ideas of measurement by offering a graph to chart the growth of the flower bulb in the classroom.
•Skills: observation, measurement, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox, and a book of the children's names and pictures.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Name cards are added to encourage familiarity with letters, writing, and to enable children to copy the names of their peers to use in "mailing letters." To connect writing to social and dramatic play activities by adding a mailbox to dramatic play as a place for children to place their writings.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library continues to provide familiar stories, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals. Books based on animal growth and change have also been added.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, measuring, growth, and community building.

Large Motor (Gym)
•Materials: Gym: mats are positioned in the middle providing a tiled space surrounding the mats for the children to bike on; a ladder leading up to a platform; climbing structure leading to a roller-slide (padded rollers lined up along a slope for children to slide/roll down, as on a slide); and climbing bars along one wall.
•Rationale: With the frigid temperatures of late outdoors on the playground, we will be planning to spend our physical-play time primarily in the gym, with the playground available as backup, weather allowing. The children have become reacquainted with the gym and its equipment in recent weeks, although this week we have changed some of the equipment available for play. Bikes have been added for the children to practice peddling. This will give students the opportunity to practice different kinds of large motor skills and use their bodies differently.
•Skills: The bikes are provided for the children to develop coordination to get the bike to move as well as strengthen their leg muscles. The other climbing, sliding/rolling and jumping equipment will also encourage large motor skill development, cooperative play and social problem-solving, such as turn-taking. All areas are intended to generate skill training in balance, spatial relationships, jumping and landing, core strength, risk-taking, full-body coordination, and hand-eye

Snacks:
Will be added soon!

Special announcements:
April will be lead teaching this week.

Small groups begin this week: The Sculpture group, the Measurement group, and the Vehicles group will have their first meetings this week. Stay tuned for updates!

Conferences begin next week! Make sure you sign up for a meeting time.

Overview: Despite last having only two school days last week, the children's interests continue to blossom in many interesting ways. Cooperative building and idea sharing continues to thrive in the block area, as the children plan and work together to create airplanes and fly each other to exciting new places. Additionally, the children recently began using 1 inch tiles, instead of the larger tiles, to create small but extremely detailed collages. As we head into a new week, large boards are made available so the children can include their tile creations in a larger, mosiac-inspired, piece of collaborative art. This may also provide an opportunity to combine this art adventure with a new mathematical concept the children have been discussing: patterning. The children participated in completing ABAB patterns at large group last week, excited cheering what color they thought might come next in a sequence. New patterning items are made available in the math area this week to extend this new interest and to give the children a chance to create more complex patterns.

Sensory
•Materials: water, various containers, materials for sinking and floating, dry erase charts to record findings of what sink and float.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of water by exploring with what materials will sink and float. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, idea sharing, and recording of findings. To include interesting and novel materials and think about the characteristics that cause objects to float or to sink.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, mosaic tiles and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, multi-colored stones sorting and patterning games, patterning pegs and pegboards
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting new mathematic concepts such as patterning and numeral recognition. To specifically highlight the skill of patterning, so children become aware of how to create or extend increasingly complex patterns
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving.

Blocks

•Materials: Large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials (boards, some tools, etc.), dramatic play props for vet's office, and Legos in the cave.
•Rationale: To support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry and spatial reasoning, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences, while bringing together block play with current dramatic play interests - most recently, in building and playing in an "airplane." Legos (in the cave) provide a different building experience on a smaller scale with different materials, such as wheels.
•Skills: Large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem-solving, social problem-solving, and fine motor development

Dramatic Play
•Materials: Housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed animals and animal care items (leashes, food dishes, brushes, etc), and office supplies. The block area is also available for dramatic play (specifically, in the airplane the children have built), mailbox.
•Rationale: To allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. Extend airplane play into imagined journeys, with the rich creative and cognitive ideas, options and information/learning inherent in such play. To connect writing activities with dramatic play.
•Skills: Gross- and fine-motor skills, creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials and tiles for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape, long boards for group tile collage.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art. To continue the ongoing exploration of collage by using differently sized tiles. To extend the social and collaborative nature of art by offering larger boards so children can work together to make a mosiac.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, flower bulb, rulers, and pre-grown plants.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage deeper investigation into growth, change, and measurement by watching and caring for a plant in our classroom as it grows from bulb to flowering plant. To introduce ideas of measurment by offering tools such as rules to measure and chart the growth of plants in the classroom.
•Skills: observation, measurement, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words, mailbox.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. New resource texts are available to encourage familiarity with print and to show the many uses of the written word. To connect writing to social and dramatic play activities by adding a mailbox to dramatic play as a place for children to place their writings.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library has been updated with texts to focus on the changes experienced in winter, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, measuring, growth, and community building.

Large Motor (Gym)
•Materials: Gym: bowling set (small plastic bowling pins and balls) set up along one side of gym with room to bowl; climbing platform leading to jumping donut (circular/cylindrical padded pit lined with large bean bags inside the hole); climbing structure leading to a roller-slide (padded rollers lined up along a slope for children to slide/roll down, as on a slide); and climbing bars along one wall.
•Rationale: With the frigid temperatures of late outdoors on the playground, we will be planning to spend our physical-play time primarily in the gym, with the playground available as backup, weather allowing. The children have become reacquainted with the gym and its equipment in recent weeks, although this week we have changed some of the equipment available for play. A plastic bowling set has been added, and some large padded cylinders have been attached to the roller-slide climbing structure. This will give students the opportunity to practice different kinds of large motor skills and use their bodies differently.
•Skills: The bowling set provides opportunities for turn-taking, social and cooperative play, large and fine motor development, and counting (one-to-one correspondence). The other climbing, sliding/rolling and jumping equipment will also encourage large motor skill development, cooperative play and social problem-solving, such as turn-taking. All areas are intended to generate skill training in balance, spatial relationships, jumping and landing, core strength, risk-taking, full-body coordination, and hand-eye coordination.

Special Announcements:
Don't forget to sign up for a conference! The sign up sheet is available on the classroom door.

Snacks

Monday - Oranges & pretzels
Wednesday - Cinnamon toast & milk
Thursday - Frozen peas & crackers

Overview: As we enter our third week, the children continue to become comfortable with the new routine, and their play in the classroom is becoming more and more complex. As we observe the children's activities, the teachers think about the ways we can create a supportive learning environment that will extend each child's learning. Based upon an emerging interest in pet care, we have included more pet care items as well as office supplies to extend the "vet office" play that the children have brought to the block area. Additionally, we will continue our ongoing exploration of change as we continue to record our observations of the construction and investigate the demolition through dramatic play, drawing, and building in the classroom. Dramatic Play •Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed animals and animal care items (leashes, food dishes, brushes, etc), office supplies. •Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. Extend complex "care-taking" play into the care of familiar pets, and to support the children's emerging interest in creating a veterinary clinic by providing office supplies and animal-care books. •Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks

•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, furniture, peg people, construction materials, dramatic play props for vet's office, Legos in the cave.
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences, while bringing together block play with current dramatic play interests. Legos provide a different building experience on a smaller scale with different materials, such as wheels.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem solving, social problem solving, mathematical thinking, and counting (one-to-one correspondence), fine motor development

Sensory
•Materials: water, various containers, materials for sinking and floating, dry erase charts to record findings of what sink and float.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience while furthering the children's understanding of water by exploring with what materials will sink and float. Encourage prediction making, active experimentation, idea sharing, and recording of findings.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, prediction-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, mosaic tiles and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle, multi-colored stones sorting and patterning games.
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting new mathematic concepts such as patterning and numeral recognition.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel, natural materials and tiles for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, bottle caps, glue, and tape.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art, and to extend visual collage through the use of a new medium: tiles.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.
Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, flower bulb.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. To encourage deeper investigation into growth and change by watching and caring for a plant in our classroom as it grows from bulb to flowering plant. To finish the long-term investigation of a decomposing pumpkin via one final observation.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary, and samples of written words.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To expand interest in children to write letters to people. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. New resource texts are available to encourage familiarity with print and to show the many uses of the written word.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library has been updated with texts to focus on the changes experience in winter, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals as well as books that discuss construction and building to help extend our investigation of the construction site next door.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building.

Large Motor
• Materials: Gym: climbing wall, jumping donut, monkey bars, slide-climber. Playground: shovels, buckets, sleds
• Rationale: We will be going back a minimal set up in the gym to let the children get reacquainted with the equipment (as well as help the student teachers get comfortable in the gym!). We will be leading several games this week: including Sleeping Children, several parachute games, and yoga. As for the playground, because we are at the mercy of Mother Nature, we will bring out materials based on the weather for the day. We had fun creating our own games as well as exploring the natural beauty of the playground during the fall, and we will keep that alive during the winter months, as well!
• Skills: locomotor skills of walking and running, dynamic/static balance, depth perception, eye-to-hand/eye-to-foot coordination, spatial skills, body awareness, turn taking, social interaction

Special Announcements:
The teachers will be co-teaching this week.
Elizabeth will be cooking granola with the children on Wednesday.
Friday, January 20th-Gym Jam in Bierman Gym

Snacks:
Monday - No School
Wednesday - Granola and yogurt
Thursday - Cornbread muffins & milk

Overview: As the children return to the classroom after the break, several familiar items remain available. These items, including the dramatic play "kitchen" as well as the Lego cave, and familiar art materials encourage children to revisit the rich play that they began last session. Additionally, some new items have been included in the classroom to encourage new exploration and creative thinking. The children can explore marbles and ramps in the nook area and experiment with building different structures to move the marbles. Additionally, the science area contains magnifier, prisms, mirrors, and kaleidoscopes to encourage exploration with the sense of sight. In addition to continuing to build community in the classroom, we will also begin introducing a variety of academic concepts throughout the classroom and during large group activities throughout the session.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder, stuffed animals and animal care items (leashes, food dishes, brushes, etc)
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session. Extend complex "care-taking" play into the care of familiar pets.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks

•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabrics, Legos in the cave.
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. Legos provide a different building experience on a smaller scale with different materials, such as wheels.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem solving, social problem solving, mathematical thinking, and counting (one-to-one correspondence), fine motor development

Sensory
•Materials: water, various containers, materials for sinking and floating
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of volume and conservation. To further the children's understanding of water by exploring with what materials will sink and float. Encourage prediction making and active experimentation.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, observation and recording, predicting-making, comparing and contrasting.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, memory games, mosaic tiles and grids, rectangular "problem-solving" puzzle
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. To support complex problem-solving skills. To encourage cooperation and communication between peers while highlighting new mathematic concepts such as patterning and numeral recognition.
•Skills: number/numeral recognition, patterning skills, matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, problem solving.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, beads laces, bottle caps, glue, and tape.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic elements of art.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, identification of texture.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, decomposed pumpkin, mirrors, magnifying glasses, prisms, kaleidoscopes, flower bulb.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. To encourage children to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record, while focusing on the sense of sight. To encourage deeper investigation into growth and change by watching and caring for a plant in our classroom as it grows from bulb to flowering plant. To continue the long-term investigation of a decomposing pumpkin, and to record the changes it has undergone over the break.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, making comparisons, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, pictures of children in our classroom, alphabet chart, dictionary.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. New resource texts are available to encourage familiarity with print and to show the many uses of the written word.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition, using texts in a variety of ways.
•Materials: The library has been updated with texts to focus on the changes experience in winter, as well as books that highlight the alphabet and numerals.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building.

.
Special Announcements:
Elizabeth will be lead teaching as our two new student teachers, April and Tali, become familiar with the children and the daily routine.

Please continue to send your children dressed for outdoor play!

Save the Date: Gym Jam will be held on January 20th.

Snacks:
Monday - Cucumber slices & saltines
Wednesday - Animal crackers & milk
Thursday - Cereal & milk

Overview: We continue building upon the interests of the children. Last week, measuring and pouring at the water table was a favorite activity. We will continue the exploration of water this week. Also this week, we are expanding on train building and bringing them into the nook and letting the children create their own types of trains out of small boxes. We are also adding yellow, the last primary color, to the easel and giving the children the opportunity to mix all the colors together and see the result. Legos have also made a home in our classroom and are very popular with all the children. Riley's mom will be coming in this week to help with a cooking project. Finally, we will introduce a new gym set-up on Wednesday

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder.
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks

•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabrics. Books about trains and engineer's caps are added to extend train building play.
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. To bring interests the children express in other areas of the classroom (i.e. creating trains in the art area) and encourage new ways of thinking about a concept. Legos were added into one of the caves in order to provide a new building experience on a smaller scale.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem solving, social problem solving, mathematical thinking, and counting (one-to-one correspondence), fine motor development

Sensory
•Materials: water, various size containers and scoops, and buckets.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of volume and conservation. Different containers and scoops will encourage comparisons between the amounts of water each container can hold.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, sorting animals, matching color games, beads and laces, large floor puzzle, and memory game, largest to smallest pegs and nesting cups
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skills as well as to encourage social interaction with the other children. As a continuation to the concept of color, children will have the opportunity to sort color based on a spectrum (lightest to darkest). Different memory games continue to be available to encourage turn-taking as well as spatial reasoning and memory skills. Nesting cups and Montessori seriation pegs are added to the area in order to encourage comparison skills and recognition of size relationships.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, seriation and patterning skills.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and at the table, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, beads laces, bottle caps, glue, and tape.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. In addition, beads and laces will also be provided for children to string beads as a take-home product. Yellow will be added to the easel for the children to explore with all the primary colors at once. Boxes, bottle caps, and other collage materials are made available in the nook area to facilitate further exploration of train-building and construction.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, and comparison between shades.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart, bean seeds, a pumpkin.
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. Exploration activities in science area are also created to promote early understanding on the needs of other living things. The children are also encouraged to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. The children will also engage in an investigating of the inside of a pumpkin at the science table. The children will have the opportunity to observe and record the decay of a pumpkin that was cut last week.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection, recording change over time.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Parent volunteers will be available to facilitate writing at the writing center, extending the children's interests in writing letters to friends and their loved ones.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition.
•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building.

Large Motor/Gym
A new gym setup will be introduced on Wednesday.
*Playground: shovels, rakes, tricycles, wagons, soccer balls, nets
*Rationale: to support fine and gross motor skills as the children play independently and in groups. To encourage cooperative play, as well as the introduction of games with rules. Provide opportunities for exploration of the natural world.
*Skills: Propulsion and reception skills, turn-taking, endurance, hand-eye coordination, calculated "risk-taking," balance, depth perception.

Special Announcements:
Cooking project: Riley's mom will be coming in to make chex mix with the children.
Kylie will be lead teaching for the second time this week.
No School Thursday, November 24th.
End of the session party, December 5th 2:00-3:15.
Class photos available: $7 (cash or check)

Snacks:
Monday: Edamame and Crackers
Wednesday: Chex Mix and Milk
Thursday: No School

We are continuing to look at different characteristics of growth and change as we expand this overarching concept to explore human and animal bodies, color, and trees in the environment. We are excited to have new materials and activities that will be added to our classroom plan. For example, in continuing children's interest in learning about snakes (introduced in one of the small groups), Sheila will be bringing in a beautiful corn snake. This will help the children to extend their thinking about snakes as they explore it using scientific observation as well as creative interpretation. We look forward to many colorful pictures as a result of this activity! In addition, we will also continue our exploration of sorting and matching colors. Our baking project this week also highlights the topic of "change," as the children observe how ingredients combine to create dough, how the dough rises, and eventually how heat bakes it into bread. This week our various small groups continue to delve deeper into their specific topic using hands-on exploration activities. Specific individuals from the community will visit our small group session to deepen children's understanding and interest on their small group topic.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items such as diapers and baby powder.
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. To support the extended, cooperative play as children work together to sustain a pretend play session.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks

•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabrics. This week, a paper train track will be added to the blocks area to enhance children's interest in creating trains.
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. To bring interests the children express in other areas of the classroom (i.e. creating trains in the art area) and encourage new ways of thinking about a concept.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, creative problem solving, social problem solving, mathematical thinking, and counting (one-to-one correspondence).

Sensory
•Materials: water, various size containers and scoops, and buckets.
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of volume and conservation. Different containers and scoops will encourage comparisons between the amount of water each container can hold.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: puzzles, sorting animals, matching color games, beads and laces, large floor puzzle, and memory game.
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skills as well as to encourage social interaction with the other children. As a continuation to the concept of color, children will have the opportunity to sort color based on a spectrum (lightest to darkest). In addition, lacing with primary color beads will be added to this area with a strong focus on children's understanding of patterning. Different memory games will also be added to this area as strong interest in this type of play is starting to grow especially with the older children in the classroom. A home made Van Gogh puzzle (Starry Night) will also be introduced to this area to enhance children's problem solving skill as well as to promote awareness of color.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, and patterning skills.

Expressive Art
•Materials: primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) mixing at the easel and the are table, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, beads and laces.
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. The exploration of different shades continues as different example photos are provided in order to encourage shade matching. This week, collaborative art (group art) will be encouraged and larger sheets of paper will be provided at table. In addition, beads and laces will also be provided for children to string beads as a take-home product. This week, a special live snake will be brought into the classroom to enhance children's learning about colors and patterns. The children will be involved in observing, replicating, and creating their own interpretation of their experiences with the live snake. The brilliant colors of the corn snake are a perfect introduction to mixing with the color yellow. We are EXCITED!
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, and comparison between shades.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart, bean seeds, light tables with x-rays, eye droppers, different water colors, and a pumpkin •Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature. Exploration activities in science area are also created to promote early understanding on the needs of other living things. The children are also encouraged to begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. We will continue mixing watercolors at the light table, and begin keeping track of the different shades we create. We will also continue to observe and record the growth of the bean seed we began to germinate last week. Similar to the idea of investigating the inside of our body, children will also be engage in investigating the inside of a pumpkin at the science table. The children will have the opportunity to cut open the pumpkin and explore the outside and inside make-up of a pumpkin (seeds, pumpkin flesh etc.).
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom.
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Parent volunteers will be available to facilitate writing at the writing center, extending the children's interests in writing letters to friends and their loved ones.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, and letter recognition.
•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies.
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts. In addition, the children are also encouraged to regard books as a source of information.
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building.

Large Motor/Gym
•Materials: Monkey bars with swing, Slide, Donut, A framed with multiple balance beam, Jumping an Running station.

•Rationale: To support upper and lower body coordination, strength and balance. To provide opportunities for classifying and identifying shapes and colors. To support social skills, turn taking, and collaboration. This week, a teacher-facilitated "Red Light, Green Light" game will be introduced on the playground to offer another experience to play a game with rules. This organized game will focus on children's body coordination, impulse control, listening skills, and responding to cues.
•Skills: 
Running and jumping zone: jumping from one space to another, spatial relationships. Monkey bar with swings: core strength, balance, and turn taking. Slide with donut: climbing, visual-depth perception, jumping, sliding, balancing, motor coordination. A frame with balance beam: climbing, balance, and motor coordination.

Special Announcements:
Cooking project: Elizabeth will lead in making tasty Bread & Butter cooking on Wednesday. 

Fiza will be lead teaching for the second time this week.

Snacks:
Monday: Peas and Crackers
Wednesday: 
Yogurt and granola
Thursday: Bread & Butter

Overview: This week we will continue to focus on growth and change. We will be bringing new additions to our classroom for exploring. There will be x rays for the children to observe and see what is inside our bodies. There will also be art pictures for the children to match the color shades as they paint. There will be new lacing beads to encourage exploration with pattern-making. We will also continue our body-tracing activity this week. Small groups continue to develop, as each group delves more deeply into their specific topic using hands-on exploration activities.

Dramatic Play

•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), doctor equipment, eye chart and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers, 

•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Doctor equipment has been added to foster experiences in care-giving in the classroom. Novel doctor's equipment, such as eye charts, will extend the "doctor's office" play occurring in the dramatic play area.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabric.

•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. Fabric is added to add another dimension to the child's creative play, allowing for different building experiences, such as creating a roof or a tent.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking, counting blocks (one-to-one correspondence).

Sensory

•Materials: wet sand, shovels, molds, buckets, and instructional steps on building a sand castle.

•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, shape, and texture. Children will continue to experience the different medium of the damp sand and mold with the sand. The children will also be able experiment with building their sculptures upwards. 
Images of sand-castles are added to the area to help encourage divergent building techniques.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume and geometry.

Math and Manipulatives

•Materials: puzzles, sorting animals, matching color games, beads and laces, large floor puzzle.

•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles, such as floor puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skills as well as foster socialization with the other children. As a continuation to the concept of color, children will have the opportunity to match colors to an object of that same color. In addition, lacing with primary color beads are added to this area with a greater focus on patterning and color sorting.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, patterning skills.



Expressive Arts

•Materials: two primary colors (red and blue) mixing in white and black at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, pictures of art

•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. The exploration of different shades continues as different example photos are provided in order to encourage shade matching. Additionally, group art will be encouraged by providing larger sheets of paper at the art table.

•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, comparison between shades.

Science

•Materials:1. cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart, bean seeds.
2. Light tables with x-rays 
3. eye droppers, different water colors
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things. To begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. We will continue to trace our bodies this week and compare our heights. We will continue mixing water colors at the light table, and begin keeping track of the different shades we create. We will also continue to observe and record the growth of the bean seed we began to germinate last week.

•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection.

Language and Literacy

•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom

•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give the children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Parent volunteers will be available to facilitate writing at the writing center, extending the children's interests in writing letters to friends and loved ones.

•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition

•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies

•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts, introduce books as a source of information

•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building

Large Motor

Gym

Materials: Monkey bars with swing, Slide, Donut, A framed with balance beam, Jumping and Running station.
Rationale: To support upper and lower body coordination, strength and balance. To provide opportunities for classifying and identifying shapes and colors. To support social skills, turn taking, and collaboration.
Skills:
Running and jumping zone: jumping from one space to another, spatial relationship
Monkey bar with swings: core strength, balance, turn-taking
Slide with donut: climbing, visual-depth perception, jumping, sliding, balancing, motor coordination
A frame with balance beam: climbing, balance, motor coordination

Special Announcements:
Picture day: Wednesday November 9th! Make sure you return your order form if you would like your child's pictures.
Granola Bar cooking: Sheila will join us in our classroom on Wednesday for a cooking project.
Jennifer will be lead teaching for the second time this week.

Snack:
Monday: Graham Crackers and Milk
Wednesday: Carrots and Saltines
Thursday: Granola Bars and Milk

Dramatic Play
 •Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food), doctor equipment, and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers, apples 
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Doctor equipment has been added to foster experiences in care-giving in the classroom. The familiar items continue to facilitate discovery related to the materials. •Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, and symbolic representation

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, and different colored fabric.

•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. Fabric is added to add another dimension to the child's creative play, allowing for different building experiences, such as creating a roof or a tent.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking, counting blocks (one-to-one correspondence).

Sensory

•Materials: wet sand, shovels, molds, and buckets

•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, shape, and texture. Children will continue to experience the different medium of the damp sand and mold with the sand. The children will also be able experiment with building their sculptures upwards. 
Images of sand-castles are added to the area to help encourage divergent building techniques.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume and geometry.

Math and Manipulatives

•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, interlocking cubes, sorting animals, matching color games.

•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles, such as floor puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skills as well as foster socialization with the other children. As a continuation to the concept of color, children will have the opportunity to match colors to an object of that same color. In addition, lacing beads activity continues in this area with a greater focus on patterning and color sorting.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development, patterning skills.



Expressive Arts

•Materials: two primary colors (red and blue) mixing in white and black at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors

•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. We will highlight two colors (red and blue) and the children can mix their own shades by adding white and black into the paint containers, creating new shades of colors to paint with. The children will also continue to explore different continuum of two primary colors (lighter to darker) along with the secondary color that will be observed when these colors mix.

•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, comparison between shades.

Science

•Materials:1. cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart, bean seeds.
2. Light tables with tracing paper and leaves
3. eye droppers, different water colors,
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things. To begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. We will begin to trace our bodies this week and compare our heights. Adding water droppers of different colors to the light tables will give the children the opportunity to explore mixing and blending of different colors in water, and extend the paint mixing from previous weeks. In the science area, we will also begin to grow bean seeds and measure their growth.

•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection.

Language and Literacy

•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom

•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give the children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings.

•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition

•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies

•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts, introduce books as a source of information

•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building

Large Motor

Gym

Materials: Monkey bars with swing, Slide, Donut, A framed with balance beam, Jumping and Running station.
Rationale: To support upper and lower body coordination, strength and balance. To provide opportunities for classifying and identifying shapes and colors. To support social skills, turn taking, and collaboration.
Skills:
Running and jumping zone: jumping from one space to another, spatial relationship
Monkey bar with swings: core strength, balance, turn-taking
Slide with donut: climbing, visual-depth perception, jumping, sliding, balancing, motor coordination
A frame with balance beam: climbing, balance, motor coordination
Snack:
Monday - Oranges & pretzels
Wednesday - Salad & milk
Thursday - Pumpkin muffins

Special Announcements:

• Kylie begins lead-teaching.

• We will be making a healthy and nutritious salad as our snack one day and discuss the importance of eating healthy to help our bodies grow.

Overview: As we continue to focus on our overarching topic about growth and change, we will specifically look at how growth and change affect human bodies, colors, as well as living trees in our environment. For example, the children will observe closely the changes in their heartbeat as well as other physiological changes that might occur after engaging in a fast paced activity. In addition, this week, a few new materials will be added to the different learning areas for children's exploration. Musical instruments and other songs will also be added during our large group time. As we probe more deeply into the idea of growth and change, the teachers will provide different activities to scaffold and extend children's learning and understanding of this topic.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food) and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers, apples

•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Diapers have been added to extend children's interest in care-giving and exploring the needs of others. The familiar items continue to facilitate discovery related to the materials. To allow children to extend their experiences cooking with apples through imaginative play
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, pictures of previous building projects

•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. To support concepts of measuring and comparison. All this week, the children will still continue with "How many blocks tall are you?" activity. After collecting all the data, the children and teachers will graph their findings on height similarities and differences. In addition, children's previous experiences in building different structures will be printed out and make visible in the area to inspire and enrich children's future exploration.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking, counting blocks (one-to-one correspondence).

Sensory

•Materials: wet sand, shovels, molds, and buckets

•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, shape, and texture. Children will continue to experience the different medium of the damp sand and mold with the sand. The children will also be able experiment with building their sculptures upwards. 

•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume and geometry.

Math and Manipulatives

•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, seriation pegs, interlocking cubes, sorting animals

•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skill. As a continuation to the question of the day activity, children will start graphing the different eye color that can be found in the classroom. In addition, lacing beads activity will also be introduced in this area for children to practice their fine motor skills
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development.



Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)

•Materials: one primary color (red) mixing in white and black at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors

•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. We will highlight one color (red) and the children can mix their own shades by adding white and black into the paint containers, creating new shades of colors to paint with. The children will also continue to explore different continuum of one primary color (lighter to darker)

•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, comparison between shades.

Science
•Materials:1. cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart
2. light tables with different translucent materials; tracing paper, leaves
3. leaves, branches, acorns, magnifying glasses

•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things, to become aware of what materials come from trees and trees' different lifecycles. To begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record. A "Different Parts of Our Body" memory game activity will emphasize the differences and similarities between individuals.

•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection.

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom

•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give the children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Children are still exploring this area.

•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition

•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies

•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts, introduce books as a source of information

•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building

Large Motor

Gym

*Materials: Balance beam/A-frame/Slide, Jumping station, Monkey bars

*Rational: to provide experience with balance. Balance beam for the children to cross to get to the A-frame slide is placed in the gym. The landing donut has been removed from the jumping station to encourage/promote the children's dynamic balance (i.e. jumping and landing) as they develop the strength and coordination necessary to land solidly on two feet. The monkey bars will be available - fostering full-body strength/coordination/balance as the children flip themselves upside-down, hang and swing on. 

*Skills: jumping and landing, balancing, upper-body strength, lower body strength

Playground

Materials: Shovels, buckets, bikes, and wagons; climbing structure, monkey bars, slide, swings, logs.

-Rationale: Offer plenty of opportunities for the children to use their big body muscles. Encourage cooperation and social connections through dramatic play. Offer opportunities to enjoy the outdoors and notice and investigate the changes taking place.

-Skills: Running, biking, pedaling, hauling, digging, balancing, jumping, upper body strength, coordination, strength and endurance.

Snack:
Monday: 
Wednesday: Thursday:

Special Announcements:

• Fiza begins lead-teaching.

• We are collecting leaves from home for our light table activity! Please bring in any type of leaves that can be found at home to share with peers and teachers.

Overview: This week we are still focused on growth and change. We are looking at how the outdoors is changing, how we are growing, and how we can change colors within our classroom. We are bringing items from outside into our classroom and observing what these items look like up close. We are continuing to discuss our trip to the apple orchard. We will be eating and cook with the apples that we pick, as well as explore the topic of apples at large group.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food) and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers, apples
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Diapers have been added to extend children's interest in care-giving and exploring the needs of others. The familiar items continue to facilitate discovery related to the materials. To allow children to extend their experiences cooking with apples through imaginative play.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars, pictures of previous building projects
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks, by allowing children to reflect and build upon previous block experiences. To support concepts of measuring and comparison.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking

Sensory
•Materials: wet sand, shovels, molds, and buckets
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, shape, and texture. Children will continue to experience the different medium of the damp sand and mold with the sand. The children will also be able experiment with building their sculptures upwards.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials, math concepts related to volume and geometry.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, seriation pegs, interlocking cubes, sorting animals
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skill. Children will start graphing through the use of color. The children will also use hollow blocks to see how their height is in comparison with everyone else in the classroom. Teachers will assist the children in these activities in order to introduce graphing.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development.

Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: one primary color (red) mixing in white and black at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. We will highlight one color (red) and the children can mix their own shades by adding white and black into the paint containers creating new shades of colors to paint with.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, comparison between shades.

Science
•Materials:1. cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, feeding chart
2. light tables with different translucent materials; tracing paper, leaves
3. leaves, branches, acorns, magnifying glasses
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things, to become aware of what materials come from trees and trees' different lifecycles. To begin using different tools to observe, investigate and record.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give the children the opportunity to create their own stories and writings. Children are still exploring this area.
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition
•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts, introduce books as a source of information
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building

Large Motor
Gym
*Materials: Balance beam/A-frame/Slide, Jumping station, Monkey bars
*Rational: to provide experience with balance. Balance beam for the children to cross to get to the A-frame slide is placed in the gym. The landing donut has been removed from the jumping station to encourage/promote the children's dynamic balance (i.e. jumping and landing) as they develop the strength and coordination necessary to land solidly on two feet. The monkey bars will be available - fostering full-body strength/coordination/balance as the children flip themselves upside-down, hang and swing on.
*Skills: jumping and landing, balancing, upper-body strength, lower body strength
Playground
Materials: Shovels, buckets, bikes, and wagons; climbing structure, monkey bars, slide, swings, logs.
-Rationale: Offer plenty of opportunities for the children to use their big body muscles. Encourage cooperation and social connections through dramatic play. Offer opportunities to enjoy the outdoors and notice and investigate the changes taking place.
-Skills: Running, biking, pedaling, hauling, digging, balancing, jumping, upper body strength, coordination, strength and endurance.

Snack:

Monday: Apples and rice cakes
Wednesday: Applesauce Muffins
Thursday: No School

Special Announcements:
• Conferences begin this week!
• Jennifer begins lead-teaching.
• Please join us for creativity night! Tuesday, October 18th from 6-7:30

Overview
The beautiful weather outside and the rich and inviting materials in our classroom have served to create several learning opportunities throughout the first weeks of school. This week, we will continue to use the outdoors to fuel our investigations. On Wednesday, our trip to the apple orchard will provide an opportunity to observe growth and change in nature, while presenting us with a hands-on exploration of where our food comes from. Additionally, we will continue to delve into ideas of growth and change in the classroom. The student teachers are busy planning experiences in the classroom that encourage children to investigate three different topics: Color, Trees, and Bodies. They will begin building awareness of these topics this week and continue creating opportunities for the children to explore how these things change over time.

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food) and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Diapers have been added to extend children's interest in care-giving and exploring the needs of others. The familiar items continue to facilitate discovery related to the materials.
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together. To continue the already rich social and creative play surrounding building with hollow blocks.
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical thinking

Sensory
•Materials: wet sand, shovels, molds, and buckets
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, shape, and texture.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials.

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, seriation pegs, interlocking cubes, sorting animals
*Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and collaborate to support each other's learning, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning. More complex puzzles are added to this area to challenge students' problem solving skill.
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, number recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), matching, one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development.

Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: one primary color (red) at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers, and engage in an in-depth investigation of a basic element of art. A real life object such as an apple will also be added to the area for children to use as inspiration. Highlight one color (red) to begin introducing ideas of different hues and shades.
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition, comparison between shades.

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, magnifying glasses, light tables with different translucent materials
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things, to offer beginning experiences in color mixing, and guide experimentation with light and different opaque and translucent materials.
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give them the opportunity to create their own stories and writings
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition
•Materials: the library has books that are reflective of our continuing curricula such as trees, colors, and the growth and development of our bodies
•Rationale: to encourage reading time with friends and teachers, encourage exploration of fiction and nonfiction texts, introduce books as a source of information
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, and community building

Large Motor
Gym
New gym set up! Will update as soon as I get the update from the set-up team!

Playground
Materials: Shovels, , buckets, bikes, and wagons; climbing structure, monkey bars, slide, swings, logs.
-Rationale: Offer plenty of opportunities for the children to use their big body muscles. Encourage cooperation and social connections through dramatic play. Offer opportunities to enjoy the outdoors and notice and investigate the changes taking place.
-Skills: Running, biking, pedaling, hauling, digging, balancing, jumping, upper body strength, coordination, strength and endurance.
Special Announcements:
*Wednesday, October 12: Visiting an apple orchard! Please arrive at 12:30 so that all children can use the bathroom and board the bus by 12:45.
Rationale: To continue to build a strong community of learners. To draw attention to changes happening around us during the fall, as well as learn about different types of trees and the ways people interact with them.
Skills: Exploration and Inquiry (cycle of learning), cooperation and working together, comparing and contrasting.

Snacks:
Monday: Popcorn and Raisins
Wednesday: Animal Crackers and Apples
Thursday: Applesauce and Granola Bars

Overview: The first full week of school involved a great deal of exploration around the classroom and outdoors. The children eagerly approached all of the areas of the classroom, creating unique works of art, exercising their imagination as they pretended to cook and care for babies, enjoying the written word in our cozy book area, and collaborating and constructing together in the block area. This week, the classroom will see a few small changes that reflect the interests of the children. New measuring materials will be available in the sand table to extend the children's investigation of the best ways to fill containers. The math area has been updated with a few new materials that encourage comparisons between objects, including sorting by size, shape, and color. This week will also bring our first class cooking project, as we work together to make hummus that we will enjoy during snack time. Cooking projects are an excellent way to continue building community in our classroom, as they bring us together and allow us to work towards a common goal. By combining a few novel materials with already familiar items in the classroom, we will allow the children to gradually become comfortable with the classroom while slowly extending they play and sparking new interests

Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: primary colors (blue, red, yellow) at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, and foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition

Sensory
•Materials: sand, measuring cups, containers of various sizes
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience, to emphasize concepts of size, volume, and number.
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, scientific exploration, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials

Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, magnifying glasses, overhead projector with different translucent materials
•Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature, to begin understanding the needs of other living things, to offer beginning experiences in color mixing
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection

Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food) and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items, diapers
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props. Diapers have been added to extend children's interest in care-giving and exploring the needs of others
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation

Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, seriation pegs, interlocking cubes
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and work together in a group, to encourage beginning mathematical concepts, such as counting, sorting, and patterning
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development

Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape, and pictures of children in our classroom
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give them the opportunity to create their own stories and writings
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition
•Materials: the library has books that might be familiar to the children on topics about animals, school, families, and friendships
•Rationale: to encourage cozy reading time with friends and teachers
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, community building

Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical

Large Motor
•Materials: gym--slide climber, wall mounted ladders, monkey bars, rocking boat, A-frame jumping station
•Rationale: a simple set-up in the gym is inviting and allows the children to assess gross motor abilities and confidence
•Skills: Risk taking, climbing, coordination, upper body strength, depth perception, balance, jumping and landing
•Materials: playground--shovels, buckets, bikes, and wagons
•Rationale: to support basic motor skills, and to promote social interaction and role play as children dig, haul, run, and pedal
•Skills: upper and lower body development, physical fitness, coordination, and perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness)

Special Interest:
Cooking project: On Wednesday, children and teachers will engage in measuring, mixing, blending, and eating, as we cook hummus together.
Large Group Meeting--music, movement, discussion, and story reading will be used to help build community and emphasize togetherness.
Snacks:
Monday - Animal crackers & milk
Wednesday - Carrots & hummus
Thursday - Apples & milk

Overview: As the school year begins, we will offer simple and familiar materials to encourage exploration of the classroom environment as well as facilitate connections between individuals. The teachers will focus on helping the children build relationships with one another and establish new friendships. Our classroom is arranged to stimulate investigating as well as promote a sense of familiarity, comfort, and joy.
Expressive Arts (paint, collage, clay)
•Materials: primary colors (blue, red, yellow) at the easel, natural materials for collage, clay, markers, crayons, colored pencils, scissors
•Rationale: to explore with hands and tools to promote sensory awareness, increase fine motor skills, and foster social relationships as children observe and work together with their peers
•Skills: fine motor development (strength, coordination), creativity, symbolic representation, sensory input, color recognition
Sensory (sand, scoops, funnels, containers)
•Materials: sand with shovels, rakes, and miscellaneous containers for scooping and pouring
•Rationale: to cooperatively work together while exploring a familiar sensory experience
•Skills: large and fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, knowledge of conservation, cooperative play, social relationships building, sharing materials
Science
•Materials: cockroaches, beetles, mealworms, salamander, magnifying glasses, overhead projector with differently shaped materials •Rationale: to support children's curiosity of the natural world around us and to encourage the investigation of nature
•Skills: observation, scientific investigation and inquiry, outdoor/indoor connection
Dramatic Play
•Materials: housekeeping materials (furniture, dishes, food) and dress-up fabric and shoes; the caves are set as bedrooms with "beds," baby dolls, and baby-care items
•Rationale: to allow for the expression of family life and to encourage social interaction while playing with familiar props
•Skills: creative role-play, peer interaction, social problem solving, symbolic representation
Math and Manipulatives
•Materials: pegs and pegboards, puzzles, shape boards, seriation stacker
•Rationale: to encourage children to work with open-ended materials where they can develop more complex skills and work together in a group
•Skills: color recognition, shape recognition, seriating (i.e. stacking highest to lowest), one-to-one correspondence, counting, fine motor development
Language and Literacy
•Materials: the writing center has a variety of writing utensils, paper, envelopes, staplers, tape
•Rationale: to involve children in writing and the social activity of note and letter writing. To give them the opportunity to create their own stories and writings
•Skills: fine motor, pre-writing, letter recognition
•Materials: the library has books that might be familiar to the children on topics about animals, school, families, and friendships
•Rationale: to encourage cozy reading time with friends and teachers
•Skills: receptive language, early literacy, listening, community building
Blocks
•Materials: large hollow blocks, small multi-shaped unit blocks, wooden doll houses, furniture, peg people, wooden cars
•Rationale: to support children's creativity and problem solving skills, to develop mathematical skills/awareness of geometry, and to allow for opportunities for social interaction as children collaborate and build together
•Skills: large motor development, expressive creation, symbolic representation, cooperative play, problem solving, mathematical
Large Motor
•Materials: gym--A-frame slide, wall mounted ladders, monkey bars, trampoline, climber/jumping station
•Rationale: a simple set-up in the gym is inviting and allows the children to assess gross motor abilities and confidence
•Skills: Risk taking, climbing, coordination, upper body strength, depth perception, balance, jumping and landing
•Materials: playground--shovels, buckets, bikes, and wagons
•Rationale: to support basic motor skills, and to promote social interaction and role play as children dig, haul, run, and pedal
•Skills: upper and lower body development, physical fitness, coordination, and perceptual motor skills (spatial, temporal, directional, and body awareness)
Special Interest
Large Group Meeting--music and movement will be used to help the children learn each other's names and the classroom routines. This time together emphasizes togetherness and fosters the building of classroom community.
Snack
Wednesday: Graham Crackers and Milk
Thursday: Graham Crackers and Milk