This week we had a lot of fun with our letter of the week activity. We used grass for our “G” project and our children had a really fun time getting messy and green

For our small group activities we did matching activities with different shapes and practiced identifying them in elements around our classroom, we also made some fun take home booklets. For our large group activities we played with music,paint and lacing boards.  We love our lacing boards because they promote and strengthen manual dexterity in preparation for writing.  We introduced new blocks to our older group.

We had some very exciting guests this week.  Ms. Kathleen came back for music on Tuesday.  The children really enjoyed their time together.  They are particularly taken by her gathering drum and variety of scarves.  What excited me about finding Ms. Kathleen is not only that she lives in West Seattle, but also that she uses the HighScope key developmental indicators and is very much aware of the HighScope philosophy.

Another guest was Ms. Lyn Wiley who will be teaching us American Sign Language.  Since our older group is already learning some sign language, we thought it would be great to incorporate it into our program.  Ms. Renee has had a long standing obsession with this language and convinced Ms. Anna to learn along with her so she would have a signing partner.  This is how they met Ms. Lyn who also teaches at West Seattle Montessori.  We are excited to see what signs you will be seeing at home.  Ms. Lyn will be with us on Friday mornings.

Another exciting event at The Cove is our salmon feedings.  Our fry have graduated from fish flakes to blood worms.  The children love watching the fry attack the cube of worms.

On a side note, you will notice in our slideshow this week a couple pictures of the children laying down.  Both groups decided that during meditation and planning they would all lay down instead of sit up.  So cute!

We have a few additions to our T/TH group and we are having a wonderful time getting to know our new friends.  We also started our Spanish immersion program this week and it was great to see our little ones learning our new Spanish songs.

This was as always a very special week of show and tell presentations.

Now that our children have become good friends and they are comfortable with each other, it wasn’t difficult for them to talk to the class and present their items. We had fun toys and unusual objects, it was great to have so much diversity! Emerson show us his colorful turtle, Maggie brought a live worm, Chris showed us his Huskies hat and Andrew brought a Sounders soccer ball. We also had wonderful performances.  Gabriel sang and danced “Chim Chim Cheree” from the movie Mary Poppins and Ella did “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. They were all amazing and we had a great time!

Our letter of the week was F. We did some finger painting and stamping and talked about words that start with F. We also did some pattern matching activities with triangles. For our large group activities we played with aluminum foil and made giraffes, sea horses, worms, balls, crowns and hats. We talked about the texture, color and shine. It was interesting to see our children explore the material and get creative with it. We also played with sand and did a little bit of dancing.

Our pre-K class experimented with mirrors and magnifying glasses.  An impromptu discovery of light reflection turned into an entire work period of experimentation with natural and artificial light.  Eric particularly was very interested in following the reflection on the ceiling.  The children also have been working hard on writing their letters and numbers.  We have been practicing letter and number tracing and talking about the size of their writing.  We are almost finished learning the entire phonics chart.  Be sure to practice at home and ask your children to teach you the rhythm.

Some of our books for this week were: ” Time to Sleep” by Denise Fleming, “We are Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen and “Olive the Octopus Day of Juggling”.

This week we had a wonderful visit for story time, Ruby’s cousin read to us during circle and our kids were specially attentive. Our book this week was “Dinosaurumpus” by Tony Mitton.  We learned about the letter B and we glued yellow paper bananas. During our large group time we played with puppets and sang “This old man”. It’s a great song with a story that uses rhymes in order to count up to 10.  Our children had a great time with this activity.  They enjoyed looking for the right puppet, finding it and placing it on our flannel board. We also did some interactive dancing where we pretended to be giraffes, penguins, kangaroos, monkeys and elephants. For small group we worked on matching shapes. Our children did an excellent job finding the matching shapes and pasting them on their sheets. We’ll be working on more activities like this one during the next couple of weeks.

Our pre-K group is finishing up their folders for this month.  We decided as a group that we need more photos of them;)  Ms. Renee promises to take more pictures and add them to our slideshow.  Some of our children are working on their continent maps.  They are almost done coloring and getting ready to label them soon.  Some of our children are working on reading and some have just about perfected their letter recognition and sounds.   Most of our children are working on letter identification and writing numbers to 20.  We have also been practicing our 1:1 correspondence.

We had a rough end of the week with both Ms. Claudia and Ms. Anna sick and not in school so we thank you for your patience.  We started last week with two new books for our circle time: “Giraffes can’t dance” and “Meet Biscuit”.  I noticed how great our children are getting at following the daily routine. Before circle time we have a few minutes of reading “on your own” time and even-though it was a little bit challenging at the beginning, our little ones are now very comfortable with finding their books and a spot on the carpet where to read. Sometimes they like to switch books or read together and it’s great to see them being independent and looking for different books every time or even just picking their favorite one over and over again!

We have also noticed great improvement with cleanup time. Now that we have two separate groups, our little ones have more work to do during cleanup time and they needed extra direction during the first week.  Now they where on top of it!  It was great to see them taking on projects for putting away certain toys or areas and even helping each other to get the work done faster. By now they know well where everything goes and they take it upon themselves to put it in the right place.  They won’t t allow me to make any mistakes in this area because they would show me how to do it correctly!  Overall I can say they are doing a great job cleaning up after themselves and taking responsibility for their space.

Our small group activity of the week was learning the letter P which we painted purple. We also worked on sorting, we used different colored rings and we placed in different containers. For large group time we played with a little mouse that moved from one house to the other. We learned about being “above”, “below”and “next to”.

Our pre-k class is working on their monthly folder.  We practiced name tracing, filling out our weather graph and our calendar.  They are learning to be responsible for their work and a little introduction to time management.  Some of us are better at this than others as we can see from a very early age.  We also are working on our stories that we will be publishing.  It has been a long road, but most of them are able to make up their own stories using just one prompt.

Some of the topics that our group would like to learn more about are peter pan tales, unicorns, penguins and growing big and strong.  Looking forward to working these topics into the curriculum for the rest of the year.

Easing the children back into school after their winter break went smoothly.  It was nice to see that all of our children missed their time at school and were happy to be back. They were great at circle time and its nice to see how much fun they have playing together and have become great friends.

We continued to introduce Spanish words and songs to our daily routine. We are keeping circle time full of movement and fun songs, great for keeping our little ones entertained. This week we read Commotion in the Ocean and The Very Greedy Bee.

During group time we worked together on our fish tank collage and we added colorful little fish. We are following the growth of our salmon and as they grow we try to incorporate that into our work. Our children had fun picking colors for their fish and finding the right spot to glue them at in our collage. For small group we played with magnets and learn about their magnetic field, north and south pole. We also looked for materials that our magnets would “stick” to around our classroom.

Our pre-K class was really into animal bingo this week.  We worked on taking turns and etiquette around playing games.  We introduced a lesson to painting where they are able to choose the easel and be resposible for setting up and cleaning up. We are also working on our phonics chart and learned the pattern of the vowels this week.  They almost know the whole chart now.  It is great to hear them singing the phonics song while they are doing other work.  Our letter of the week is B.  They came up with their B list and we keep adding to it.

We introduced our words of gratitude for snack and lunch.  In respecting the beliefs of all of our families, we did not use the word prayer.  I spoke to the children about being grateful which is not new to them.  They can recite it for you but here are the words.

1,2,3 – we fold our hands and softly say, thank you for our snack/lunch today.  Bon Appetite, you may eat.  We are working on having everyone at the table after washing their hands and waiting until we are all ready before we start eating our food.

Our book this week was The Tiny Woman’s Coat by Joy Cowley.

We hope everyone had an enjoyable week off .   Prior to the break the children worked hard on finishing their teddy bear valentine cards and heart cards. We used different media to decorate them and our children picked between glitter, crayons, markers, chalk and stickers to decorate their bears.  We did a lot of rehearsing! We practiced our songs, dances and games. They always have fun preparing for the class parties.

Now that we have 2 separate groups we made sure to do rehearsals separately and together to ensure our little ones learned the lyrics and showed off their skills in front of the older kids.

Amidst the preparations,  we also had time to have “tea time”. We played with different sized cups, plates, jars and little spoons.  They added milk, honey and sugar, it was great!  Our pre-K group is continuing their independent work and getting lessons on The Music Maker, memory games, unifix cubes and counting spindles.  They are really liking their independent time of being able to choose their work and taking care of their classroom.

Our parties were fantastic and the children seemed to really enjoy themselves!  Thanks to all the parents for participating.

This week we mostly concentrated on our Valentine’s day activities. We worked on cards, decorations and our new songs for the show.

We have some wonderful new additions to our classroom and it’s been great to see new friendships starting at the Cove. For our Tuesday and Thursday group we now have 2 new students, Emerson and Erik. And for our Mon, Wed and Friday group we have Stella and also Erik.  It’s been fantastic getting to know our new students and rehearsing for our parties.  Our children are super excited!

We experimented with color mixing. Using some colorful screens, we learned to overlay yellow and red to create orange, green and red for brown, blue and red for purple and blue and yellow for green.  It was fun and a very easy way to learn about secondary colors.

We also had a wonderful parent visit.  Olivia’s mom joined us on Thursday to read to the class and our children really enjoyed it.  Please keep on signing up for story time.  Our children really enjoy them!

Our class is finally split for most of the day.  We are excited to have our new students join our group and we are now able to split our group of 12 into 2 smaller groups.  Our pre-K’s are exercising their independence in the morning.  Upon entering school and taking care of their belongings, they go straight to work.  It has been great seeing them acclimate to their new routine.