Wow!

Wow! We say it all the time ... but these kids are amazing! We are blown away by their questions, their intelligence and their eagerness to learn! It make our job so much fun ... and easy!

We celebrated the word "MY" today. They all began making up sentences before we even asked! They were great sentences, too. We sang our song and practiced writing the word!

Ollie the fancy mouse sent us a postcard from Japan! He went all the way to Japan! We plotted his location on the map ... along with ours. We noted that he is FAR (great social studies lesson). At the preschool level, social studies involves terms like FAR, NEAR, NORTH, SOUTH and it involved learning about different cultures. The cultures portion is really just exposing the kids to the notion that there is a big world out there and many people don't do the same things we do. They can dress differently. They can eat different foods, etc. Social studies also covers things in our neighborhood. Things like businesses and community helpers.

Because Ollie was in Japan, we learned a bit about that country. We learned it's in a different continent. We learned it was far from our home. We learned their flag is similar in overall shape (recatangle) and in color. But also very different. They don't have stars. We do. They have a circle. We don't. So, we took the opportunity to put scissors in the kids' hands and had them cut a circle and paste it on a white rectangle. Viola! The Japanese flag! We plan to do this for each place Ollie visits. After the holiday break, he will return and the kids will have a "travel log" with all the maps and flags we worked on.

Our math lessons on sorting and grouping (classification) are completed. We are moving into patterning. Classification went very well. Everyone got the hang of things. There were a few instances where we started out great, then got confused. For instance, we might have four rectangles to fill. We did one and two great then got lost on three and or four. They get the concept though so no worries. Patterning will be a breeze. They are already all over this. In fact, we decided today that we will need to step it up a bit and get slightly more complicated than red, green, red, green, etc.

Mrs. Erikson came in an taught the kids about Jackson Pollock. What a great lesson today! A few children commented on his art and said, "It's just messy!" Still many others told us various pictures reminded them or made them think of things like ants underground making a path or "a maze". Suppose that is what Jackson Pollock intended? We decided maybe he was just mad all the time! We also talked about the colors he used. Do colors make you feel a certain way? They thought blue made us cold and maybe a little sad. Interesting. Whereas yellow made us happy and warm! See? We told you they are a bright group of kids!

We read the book "The Gingerbread Boy" and played a little game. The game involved a stuffed gingerbread man and a baker. The kids passed the stuffed toys around until the baker caught the boy. They were super fast and Mrs. Sapp had to help the baker in the end!

You may have noticed the reindeer outside our room. Great! We are working on name recognition and we thought it'd be fun for the kids to "find rudolph" each day before Christmas break. So when they come in, we would like them to look at the bulletin board to see if (1) they are rudolph and (2) they know who IS rudolph. Since they know their classmates, they are beginning to look at the first letter in the names and sound them out. They can easily determine what it says (reading) by looking at this letter and sounding it out. They then "pull" from their knowledge bank and decipher! Yeah!

Finally, Ollie sent a gift package with his postcard! He sent the kids some origami. They colored the paper and folded it up to discover a dog! They brought these home today so you probably have seen it by now!