Morning Meeting:

Our morning meeting was a bit odd this time. First we sang our morning songs, along with twinkle twinkle. Then Dalila put back on our fish movie briefly to study the water once more before going into our project work today. We paid special attention to the water color, and had a bit of conversation while the movie was one. We had some counting practice this morning, so we skipped the calendar and went straight to snack.

Snack Time:

Addison was our snack helper today. She counted all of the students, and then handed out napkins. We had goldfish and water for snack.

Outside Play:

In the sandbox Lindsey started shoveling sand into a bucket. Addison became curious and asked what she was doing- they decided together that they were making a cake. It turned quickly into Addison's birthday cake. Soon Elijah, Pearson, and Willow had joined in the game and started adding eggs, vanilla, flour, etc. to the 'batter'. When the bucket was full of sand we stuck some sticks in the top for candels and sang "happy birthday" to Addison (it was her fourth birthday). We served sand to everyone on plates. We came inside a bit early today because it was cold- which was a good thing because it gave us enough time to finish our intense project work.

Project Work:

We created an ocean today. The first step was to look at the colors we mixed in a previous class period which matched water tones. We had squirt bottles filled with white, black, green, yellow, and blue. The kids had a number of cups which they used to mix larger quantities of water tones. We purposefully mixed colors that would belong in different depths of water (i.e. the dark blue would be the the ocean floor, and the light blue would be the surface). Pearson started in with his deep dark ocean color, and decided which side of the huge paper (laid out on the floor) would be the bottom of the ocean. We used small foam brushes to speed up covering all of the paper. Soon the others had finished with their color selections, and chose different areas of the ocean to work on. Sam did most of the surface water for us, and Elijah did the very middle- which ended with his feet covered in paint. Addison and Willow helped mostly on the sides, or middle-depth, and provided us with some green shades to mix in with the blue. They worked beautifully together right up until lunch time.

Rest Time/ Focused Work:

Focus time started out with some free play- Elijah went to make ramps and roads out of books again, as we did yesterday. Then the other children (before they laid down) started building a city around it made out of blocks. After our nappers went to lay down Elijah played in our sensory table for a while. Afterwards he and Sam sat down to do some focus work. Elijah's sentance today which he wrote was "I like to hike." His journal entry was covered in different germ drawings (flu, flesh eating bateria, bed bugs,  etc.) Sam drew a representation of Godzilla- sharp teeth and all- on his daily journal. Pearson soon appeared and did his own focus work. Today, among other things, he traced and read "cat" and "bat," as well as the numbers 14 and 15. After the focus work was finished we got out some magazines about cells and the body, as well as ocean books. Lindsey provided transperancy paper for them to use in order to trace images out of the books. Pearson and Elijah worked for a long time tracing micro-organisms and sea creatures. 

Free Play:

This morning Willow did a painting first thing, on the easel. Pearson immediately dressed up like Darth Vadar. Elijah, Willow. and Pearson all went into the quiet room to listen the Beatles cranked up loud, and had a lovely time with some privacy (they didn't even break any school rules in there by themselves). Addison hung out with Lindsey who helped Addison to write her name on a sheet of paper. Addison was able to make more than one letter 'A', perfectly, on her own. She drew and cut out the letters. Pearson came into the studio and presented the jar of human teeth that we have. We examined them closely- Lindsey opened her mouth to show them the similarities. They wondered how many teeth are in the mouth, so Elijah counted every one of Lindsey's teeth on her bottom jaw. He counted 17- so we wondered what that number doubled was. So we counted out 17 objects into a basket twice (added 17 and 17 objects)- then counted again the entire number of objects. Lots of counting!