And they're off...

Community Updates and Lantern Parade

There are several events happening in town today!

First, beginning at 4:00 pm Willem Lange will be reading his book, Favor Johnson, at the library. It begins at 4:00 pm and is a family friendly event with snacks.

The Lantern Parade will be starting at Stowe Elementary School at 4:30 pm. We ask that you meet us at the parade by 5:00 pm to collect your children. At that point, we will be at the tree lighting on the Village Green.

Finally, we were invited to decorate a tree at Helen Day this year. Several of the preschool children went to the art center to work on ornaments and decorate the tree. The opening will be taking place this evening from 5-8 pm and is a family event with refreshments. Please stop by and take a look, the trees are fantastic! 

Classroom Happenings

Infant I: You may have noticed a couple of furniture additions to our classroom this week: a small, round table with chairs and a low light table. Very exciting for children and teachers alike! So far we have been using the light table for climbing and looking at scarves; we love to see how the colors change as we layer them and scrunch them around. The table has allowed our older children to have a group meal time in the mornings, which gives us a nice sense of community to start out our day. There are some new challenges and limits to learn, like not standing up before we are finished eating and making sure that those who are not eating can give the table some space, but we will keep working on that. When each of our children move on to the next room, they will be prepared for an even bigger group meal time.

Infant II: A few notes from our week...A big theme recently is our exploration of color! We have been exploring the primary colors, solely paint with each color at a time. After that it's time for mixing paint, taking the primary colors and mixing them together and watching the magic happen. The children have been into painting, and never want to stop once we start. Some of the older infants spent time in the Toddler room, enjoying meals and snacks together and napping with them. We have been playing in the water and bubbles! We've been washing babies and animals and discussing their different characteristics.

Toddler Room: This week we worked in increasing our independence in the classroom. We are really encouraging the children to try to perform tasks in their own; putting in their own boots, hats, mittens, etc. We also began working on our lanterns that we will be carrying next week for our Solstice Stroll. Please note...the children do not use winter gloves in our classroom, as they are too hard for the children to get on and figured out! Please send in mittens for warm hands, thanks!

Preschool I: In the mornings Melissa worked with small groups to ready the lanterns for the upcoming parade as well as our own Solstice Stroll. The materials proved interesting and challenging for the children to use, especially the Contact paper. The rest of the children had a lot of fun in the wet, playing the the from the the hay, burying each other and making "nests" from which they liked to hatch. We continued our investigations of hockey this week, but also talked about figure skating and compared the similarities and differences of the two types of skates. ?on Thursday we went to the hockey arena and actually found a puck in the bleachers! The manager let us bring it back to school (on loan) to show the rest of the class. It was SO exciting. On Friday we went for a big hike on the Woof Trail and checked out a section we hadn't seen before. And, outdoor fun included a massive "ballet" experience thanks to HS. See pictures below!

Preschool 2: We spent time at Helen Day making ornaments for our tree. We used lots of recycled materials, glue, paint, and pom poms. We had a great time. We walked all the way there and back in the rain but no one complained! We were a little wet but had a lot of fun. We also started putting our lanterns together. We used the sticks that we gathered to make the shape and then filled each one with a balloon. Then we covered them in tissue paper and recycled art work, we used liquid starch to make it all stick together. We plan on making more for our school Solstice Stroll on December 16th.

We continue our work on letter and number identification. We are getting really good at visually identifying 1-20. The children are also great at spelling one another's names. We have been practicing with our placemats at meals.

Pre-K: This week we made a slight change in our day to help alleviate some of the difficulties we face during the winter months with added time and physical space needed for dressing for the outdoors. By flipping our snack / circle schedule, we can break into our groups more efficiently and spend some less stressful time working on our self help skills as well as learning to keep track of our belongings. (Please help us label label label!). We started on Thursday with this new schedule and found that by having our snack a little earlier, we could have as short or as long of a circle time as we needed without hungry bellies. After the songs and discussions of our whole group morning meeting, the first group was able to spread out in the hallway, get their gear on and head out on a hike up the Woof Trail. The second group was able to really focus in on a longer book with a lot of detail and some really delicious rhyming words before they bundled up and headed outside. The groups will switch periodically to offer every one time to work on different skills and activities. As we develop this new circle schedule we are also planning on adding a job chart, creating a pirate ship, and beginning an alphabet study. We will work our way through A-Z one letter per week. Next week we begin with the letter A. As you check the snack schedule, please consider working with your child to choose snacks related to the letter of the week!

 

Thanks for Reading
-Sam