Thank you all for coming in for our parent/teacher conferences. Communication is an important component as we are all working together in the best interests of your children. We value your insights and concerns, and appreciate your positive feedback.
In addition to our important center and circle learning and routines we introduced some new and exciting investigations this week. We continued with our color investigation, this week introducing yellow and red. Sophie explained, “I mixed red and yellow to make orange.” Aidan extended our investigation by using red and orange blocks to make a pattern. Our light table provided new avenues of investigation and opportunities for hypothesizing and “what if…?” thinking. Questions such as, “What happens if we put different colored (red, blue and yellow) transparent squares and triangles on our light table?” “What do you think will happen if we put a red on top of a yellow?” and so forth. Children were also excited to experiment with scarves, and some have discovered how neat it is to trace things using the light table. All of these investigations, in addition to being fun and informative, help children to master important thinking strategies. Our teacher-guided questions model these strategies and give form and structure for these essential higher-order skills. Your children are already responding in many creative ways to changes in color, form, and motion. We are building a light and color vocabulary using descriptive words as well as transforming our thinking in painting. We are integrating our investigations with language, math, science and social studies! We have even made connections and have studied the colors in French!
Another very exciting thing happened in our classroom this week in the form of wiggly visitors. Ms. S brought in wriggle worms from her compost at home. We put them in a clear container on the table with some compost. Your children were invited to wet their hands and hold the worms. “What do they feel like?” “What do they sound like?” Noelle captured the excitement by exclaiming, “Holy Moly!” Noelle said, “It tickles!” Angeliz wondered, “Do they have teeth?” Neha got down and personal with one of the worms, asking it, “Do you want to pet the carrot?” CJ loved listening to the worm book. Angeliz summed up what we all felt by stating, “They are wiggly!” Our worm visitors were a highlight of our day on Tuesday and were the favorite part of the day for Isabelle and Sonya! We have “invited” the worms to spend more time with us. As with all of our investigations we will be learning not just about worms but will learn how to learn engaging all of our senses (well, maybe not taste!) and using higher thinking strategies.
For those of you viewing this blog on your iphone or ipad, you can view the pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bcdtech/sets/72157647254977052/