Week of November 24-26, 2014!

It was a jam packed short week this week! The feeling of Thanksgiving is in full swing around here and we have a classroom full of energetic children to prove it!  As we prepared for the holiday, the children participated in preparations for our Thanksgiving Feast.  They used child safe knives to cut the potatoes and potato mashers to smash the potatoes to make our mashed potatoes.  We also feasted on turkey, corn bread and cranberry sauce, family style!  We also referred to our feast as a "Friends-giving" and a celebration of friends. Yum!

In keeping with the theme of Thanksgiving, we read several books about the meaning of being thankful. We asked each child what they were thankful for and we received many thoughful answers that included being thankful for their families, siblings and pets.  All answers were written on a tag and each child hung their card on the thankful tree.  The thankful tree will be displayed in our classroom, come on in and check it out.  In the mean time, here are a few of the children's answers:

"I am thankful to go shopping with mom and dad to buy foods and drinks" 
"I am thankful for my buttons" 
"I am thankful that my mommy and daddy love me" 
"I am thankful for Ninja Turtles" 
"I am thankful for my mommy's hugs" 
"I am thankful for my mommy who reads books to me in bed because I am afraid of the dark" 

Reminders: 
- November Shutterfly pictures are up
- The MSPCA is our organization of the month for December, please begin to bring in your donations!
- Our monthly gathering will be at Panera Bread in Burlington on Saturday, December 13th at 3pm.  Please RSVP via Evite

 Cutting the Potatoes!

 Mashing the Potatoes!

 Getting ready for Friends-giving!

The Thankful Tree

Week of November 17-21, 2014!

Happy Friday! What a great week we had! We saw Mary Beth for Music and Movement and the children learned all about native american traditions.  We also saw Teacher Rich for music class and yoga was a blast with a pretend trip to the apple farm, collecting apples and making an apple pie!

As our farmer's market curriculum continues, the children helped us to make banana bread from scratch.  They mashed the bananas, measured the ingredients and watched as the bread machine went to work.  It was the most fun watching the machine mix up the ingredients.  In addition to making the bread, the children also made their own butter! They learned about the emulsion process (vocabulary word of the week) and created butter by shaking cream in a jar with a marble.  The process was a success and believe it or not, the butter formed pretty quickly!

Up next week: Stain glass recreations inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, an American architect, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 532.  The children will recreate a stained glass piece of his using wax paper, crayons and black tape.

Lastly, we are excited to begin collecting items for various non-profit organizations around our area including Room to Grow in Boston, Heartbeat in Burlington, MSPCA in Boston/Methuen, Burlington Food Pantry and more.  If you have an organization that your would like to suggest, please email me and we can definitely add it to our donation rotation.  We will be collecting throughout the month at school and at our months gatherings.  Just think, if everyone contributes one item, we will have so much to give to people and animals in need!

Families: Don't forget to check our Shutterfly site for monthly picture updates of our adventures!

 Ingredients for our banana bread!

 Completed emulsion process (aka butter!)

Children hard at work measuring and loading up the bread machine!

Week of November 10-14, 2014

What a busy, yet productive week we had! As our Farmer's Market curriculum continues, our market is up and running smoothly, we are sorting and learning about different fruits and vegetables and we used string beans to measure various items around the room including our bodies! The children range in height from 7-11 string beans! Our science table is home to our 2 science experiments, nappa cabbage in colored water and carrot tops (also know as carrot scrapes) in water.  We are using the words "prediction" and "observation" as we watch what happens to the vegetables.  Lucky for us, the cabbage sucked up the colored water quickly and we observed the bright colors in the leaves this morning.  We are excited for the children to see the carrot scrapes begin to grow a new root and new stalks to form new carrots.

As the farmer's market season comes to an end, we encourage you to take your children to visit a local market.  Talk to your chid about unique vegetables and fruits they have never seen before.  You can also hold a taste test with your family and rate everyone's favorites using a bar graph.  It's a great way to encourage healthy eating at home while squeezing in some math skills with a bar graph.

Happy Friday!
Joanna

The nappa cabbage after 4 hours!

Introducing our Weekly Blog

We are so excited to announce the creation of our new blog spot! This will replace our newsletters and you will be able to view and learn about our week's work here.  Every Friday we will create a new post.  Be sure to sign on to see what we've been up to in our classroom, including pictures, quotes and much more.  We will also post curriculum extension activities for home.  Enjoy! We look forward to seeing you on our blog soon! 

Joanna