Happy 4th of July!

I hope everyone had a safe and fun 4th of July! We are currently on summer break. Lots of things to do, time to relax and have some fun!

We're looking forward to a great 2010-2011 school year!

School's out for summer!

What a great year we've had! School is officially over! We had a wonderful end of year picnic at a local indoor playground and a very touching promotion ceremony! The children sang two songs, one with spanish words and the other one they wrote some of the lyrics! The children were each given a certificate and the graduating 5 year olds were given a certificate and photo album while wearing some very cute graduation hats that they made that morning! It was a great day!

Literacy

The 4's class had a local children's author visit today for an enrichment activity. It was wonderful and the children were such good listeners. After she was done she asked if anyone had questions. There were some questions. But what was really great was when one of the students asked if she could read her the story she wrote in her journal. And, of course, the answer was yes! And what made it even better was the author read her story! She was so proud, as was I! The children's journals are available to them everyday in my classroom. Some draw pictures, some write stories, whatever they feel like doing!

A second girl decided to tell the author her story!

Block building is so much fun!

Hard at work!

Such a great imagination! These two boys built desks out of the blocks! Then they got the appropriate materials to make an office environment, including a telephone! They did all of this with absolutely no coaching from any adults present. Block building is such an important part of the daily curriculum in my classroom!

Back at it!

Spring break is over and we're hard at work in the classrooms again! It's hard to believe that there are only 8 weeks left for school this year! Wow! Time surely does fly by!

All of the classrooms are busy! The Four's class is learning all about Spring! The three's class will be starting a construction unit soon and the two's class is learning about night and day! Our new music teacher started today! She did a great job with the 2's and 4's today, despite a few nerves! Tomorrow she'll be enriching the 3's!

There are so many fun activities for spring time!

Science:
Sink and float with plastic eggs. We put water and plastic eggs in the sensory table and gathered small items that would fit in the eggs and guessed which items would make the eggs sink or float. One boy discovered that if all the weight was on one end of the egg, the egg stood up in the water! This fascinated all the children so off they went trying to get their eggs to stand up too!

Art:
Today we made lily pads. We started by fingerpainting with blue and yellow paint. After it dried we cut out a lily pad shape. We then used eye droppers and liquid watercolors with small coffee filters to make our lily. Tomorrow we'll make a jumping frog to put on our lily pad out of construction paper and accordion folded legs.

Spring Weather!

It's been a beautiful week of weather in our part of Illinois! I believe the adults have had as much fun playing outside as the children, maybe more! My class visited the Spurlock Museum on the University of Illinois' campus last week. We've been studying Native Americans and the storyteller at the museum was fantastic! They also made a talking stick craft too! This community has so much to offer!

Next week is Spring break! We'll take the time to regroup and get ready for the final two months of school! This year is flying by!

Another great field trip!

The 4's class had a great trip to the Parkland College Planetarium earlier this week! They learned all about the stars. The 4's will be learning about Outer Space for the next couple of weeks and then will do a unit on Native Americans with another field trip to a local museum. We are truly blessed in this community to have one major state university and one junior college that offers us many opportunities for learning!

One activity for outer space that all of my classes enjoy is using an older lite brite to make star consellations. I use black construction paper and the children push the colored pins through the paper. When they are done with their design, they connect the holes with white crayon and then name their constellation.

One easy way to remember the order of the planets from the sun is to teach the children a little rhyme.

My Very Eccentric Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.