Morning Meeting:

Amy started them off with a call and response song, and then the Itsy Bitsy Spider- she taught them a second verse. She had them put all of the calendar days from day #1 up on the calendar. Then she asked them what they knew about recycling- and wrote down their responses on a chart she made. The headings on the chart were 'what we know', 'what we want to learn', and 'what we learned'. Afterward she read a story to the class about recycling, that was actually made by a class of 5 yr. Old children! When the book was done, they re-did their chart from yesterday- placing images and pieces of recyclable materials on a [new] chart. Then she did a listening game with them- she clapped in a simple pattern, and the children were to imitate the pattern.

Snack Time:

We had cheerios and goldfish today.

Outside Play:

The kids stayed inside and had some free play in the morning, but in the afternoon we made it outside. Later they did a lot of pretend play involving monsters. There were good monsters and bad ones- Hedwig and Addison were the good monsters, but then Addison turned bad. Hedwig decided to send the bad monsters lots of love, and so invented a machine to suck up their 'bad'. The monsters also had some super powers. They also climbed on the gym, and played in the sandbox quite a bit.

Project Work:

It was a laid back day today, and as the project was in the theme of recycling, we saved it for focus time and let the children play a bit longer than usual until lunch- they were playing so nicely after all.

Rest Time/ Focused Work:

We set the studio trays on the alphabet rug upside down. The place mats were on top of the trays (so they laid flat on the bottom instead of inside the tray). Pearson, Addison, Elijah, and Hedwig were our subjects for this activity. Since we used our magazine cutouts for the recycle chart, we needed a new way to make labels for our recycling bins. Each student chose a basket which had one of the different kinds of recyclable materials. Elijah chose plastic, Addison chose glass, Hedwig chose metal, and Pearson got paper. They made displays of the materials on their mats, which were beautiful. We took pictures of each display which we will print out and attach to the bins. Miss Amy had them do their daily journals afterward, which they got to put in their focus folders themselves. Then they finally got to go have some outside time.

Free Play:

This morning all of our four children- Elijah, Hedwig, Ethan, and Lily, spent almost the entire free play time in the dark quiet room. They were pretending to be werewolves. They played nicely in there, as I said, all morning! Later after snack time they got into some toys. Elijah made an experiment with rice and water, which Hedwig was involved in. Lily and Ethan spent a lot of time at the semi-circle table playing with shells and talking about their Mommies. Lily painted a picture this morning, as well. She got her hands in the paint on her paper and rubbed them all around- you could tell that it felt very nice to her, while also making a neat pattern on her painting. When Pearson and Addison showed up, the energy level of the school went up. Hedwig and Addison played very nicely together in the kitchen and with games. At lunch Hedwig and Addison agreed, sitting next to each other, that they are 'best best friends'.