Category Archives: Classroom Posts

Bring Your Own Breakfast Days

Check out the above link for our flyer about “Bring Your Own Breakfast Week!”

Yesterday and today, the children have been prompted to think about structures in a new way.  The structures project has been going on all semester and the children are still building away.  However, this week the children heard the book called Roberto the Insect Architect by Nina Laden.  Afterwards, the children were provided a table and scrap wood so they could work on making a neighborhood or city just like Roberto made.

The children were told that they would first just work on the wood scraps for at least a few days.  The teachers want to take photos of the cities they make and use those to help plan together what the city will look like.  Once they practice and try different ideas, the city can be glued together and made into a more permanent structure.  We imagine that this may be something they work on even when we return in January.

Here are some images of what happened today:

We have started to talk with the children more about recipes for the mud kitchen.  We gave them each a “Mud Kitchen Recipe Book” where they can write down the ingredients and instructions for a mud kitchen recipe.

This is a great literacy activity.  Children write their names on the cover and watch the teacher write down the words they are speaking in the “instructions” part.

One thing the teacher noticed is that the children are not all grasping what a recipe is.  We have done baking activities in our classroom, but we are planning to do more so that they can start to see the format of a recipe: ingredients and instructions.

We also plan to use the mud kitchen daily so that children have a chance to explore more with mud kitchen recipes together.

Here are just a few examples of the “Mud Kitchen Recipe Books.”

The structures project is still going strong in Room 4.  The children have been experimenting with building using different types of materials.  Today, two children built houses out of a variety of items.  They made certain areas for their houses and specifically talked about there being kitchens.  This is exciting because they are now talking about the components of structures.  One child even used the Lego table as a roof.  There are some photos below.

We also did our planning for the next two weeks.  At the below links, you can see our environment and daily plans.  We have woven in some structures activities such as dioramas in the art studio and a study of cities using the book Roberto, the Insect Architect.

There are also other exciting plans like a bubble activity in the art studio and a small group where children are making games.  Today there was a new dinosaur game in our classroom.  Children organized dinosaurs in different ways, practicing classification skills (mathematics!).  The games are also very social in nature.

We hope you enjoy reading the plans.  Have a great weekend, too!

Environment Planning -11-25-13

Teacher Planning Document November 25 and December 2

We just added something new to our classroom: a “Giving Tree.”  This tree hangs near the sign-in book.  On it are leaves with different kinds of items written on them.  They are items and supplies that could help us enhance the learning environment for the children.

If you would like to participate, please snip a leaf off of the tree and bring it back with your donation when you have it ready for us.  Thank you so much!  Many of these items are things that cannot be purchased easily by our school and you may even have some of these things at home.

Many of you may remember the book called The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.  That was our source of inspiration!