Scarecrows and applesauce

This was a busy week for us. We practiced self talk to help us focus, especially when there are distractions that we need to ignore. Many children who have difficulty paying attention don't know exactly what they need to pay attention to. We played a game where I gave a wrong, or distracting, direction - the kids did a great job ignoring that direction!
We read stories about scarecrows, and made some wonderful scarecrows and sunflowers for our bulletin board. We also learned that sunflower and scarecrow are compound words. Our apple heads have dried and shriveled up, and one by one we are beginning to add hair, bodies and clothing to them. They are going to be wonderful! (photos later when they are all finished) Next week we will begin to write stories about our applehead people.
We ended the week by making our own applesauce. Everyone helped to grind up the cooked apples. Our classroom sure smelled good! Most of us agreed that our applesauce was very yummy!

A Great Week in Room 113!

We had a wonderful week! We did many apple activities -we read all about Johnny Appleseed, wrote in our journals, made some great art projects, and began making our dried apple head people. We are watching and waiting as our apple heads begin to shrivel and dry up, and then we will make their bodies.



In our skills for learning lesson this week we practiced focusing and paying attention so that we could follow directions. We learned that repeating a direction can help us to remember it. We also practiced asking for help when we are confused or when we didn't focus and missed some of the directions. Thus happens to everyone, and sometimes we need to ask for help.
We had real excitement on Thursday morning! Miss Marlowe is a music therapist who will come every Thursday to work with our class. She brought her guitar and taught us many songs. The children were very interested and all of them participated and seemed to really enjoy it!


Thank you to all of you who came to Curriculum Night -what a great group of parents we have in this class! I want to remind you of a few dates :
      *Friday September 28 - school picture day
      *Thursday October 18 at 6:30 - our first Parent Support Group Meeting
      * November 15  - Parent Teacher Conferences from  8:00-8:00    If you haven't signed up for a time yet, just let me know what would work best for you and I will give you a time slot.

Mrs. Vella is our music teacher. She comes into our classroom on Monday and Tuesday for our music class. In these pictures, we were listening to some music and moving our scarves according to some special directions. It was a lot of fun!


We have also been practicing our behavior in and outside of our classroom. We know that when we are in the hallway we need to walk quietly in a line. Each day a different student is our line leader.

Our Skill for Learning lesson this week was about focusing attention. To succeed in school, students need to be able to ignore distractions while focusing their attention. We learned that some special words help remind us that we need to focus our attention. We may hear a teacher/parent say, "look carefully", "listen", or "focus" when we need to really pay attention to directions or new information.

Our Curriculum Night is Thursday, Sept. 13 at 6:45. I hope to see many of you there! Ms. Momeni and I will also be starting our Parent Support Group Meetings again this year. I will give you a list of dates - we will meet on four Thursdays from 6:30 to 7:30. The dates for our meetings are:
October 18, December 6, February 7 and April 25. We will cover various topics and hope that many of you will be able to join us for these meetings this year.  

We learned and practiced!

This week we reviewed our behaviors for Group Time - sitting, looking, listening and bodies still. These are important skills for learning - your children will need these same skills when they go into general education classes to learn new things, so we practice them here every day. We also practiced our routine of reading book boxes in the morning. All of the children were able to choose a box of books and sit and "read to self" for close to 15 minutes! This is also an important skill for learning, it helps build attentional skills, and it is calm and relaxing! We had time for fun and social skills during Center Time. The boys at the play dough table were able to share, talk kindly and help each other out! All in all, it was a wonderful first week of school! I hope to see many of you next Thursday at our Curriculum Night. We will meet in our room, Room 113, at 6:45.

Our First Day Was Great!

We had a wonderful start to our new school year! It was exciting to see how the children had grown over the summer, and to hear about what they did on summer vacation. We reviewed our Rules for Learning today at Group Time and our Snail puppet helped us practice : ears listening, eyes watching, body still and mouth quiet. The kids did a great job, and we earned a link in our Team Work chain. You will be proud to know that when Miss Vella came in for our music class, your children were able to follow those rules and have an excellent music class! Later this week, I will send home a Home Link about the Rules for Learning lesson for you and your child to complete together and send back. I will also send home a permission slip for you to sign that will allow me to include photos of your child in our blog. Our day was very busy - we worked, everyone participated in a reading group, we had Center Time, heard stories, had music and Group Time and even went out to the playground when it stopped raining. Mrs. Schnieders, our social worker, was here as well today. Her days at school will be all day Tuesday and Wednesday and in the afternoon on Thursday. I am sure that your children were tired at the end of the day, but I hope they were also excited about school. We have such a wonderful group this fall! I can tell that we are going to make good progress together. I hope to see as many parents as possible at our Curriculum Night - next Thursday at 6:45. Thank you for sharing your children with us!