Our Caterpillars Are Here!

Our caterpillars have arrived and we sure are excited to meet them! There are five of them, and right now they are busy eating and crawling. We know that they came from an egg and that when they get big enough, they'll form chrsalids (the pupa stage). Inside of the chrysalids, the butterflies will grow and develop. We know that our caterpillars have been eating because they have chewed up some of the food on the bottom of their container, and they have already molted, or shed their skins, once to accommodate their growing size. We read,"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and we've begun to make our own caterpillar books, just like Eric Carle!

Problem solving and Bugs!

This week, our Skills for Learning lessons have focused on problem solving. We are practicing stopping, calming down and breathing, and then trying to think of possible solutions to a problem. I have noticed that many of the children in our program have difficulty coming up with possible solutions, and tend to fall back on less successful behaviors or reactions. We will continue to work on and practice this skill throughout the rest of the spring with role plays, stories, and a lot of discussion! I hope that some of you are seeing your children practice/try out these things at home too - when you do, be sure to praise and reinforce your child's attempts. Remember that if your child is able to "teach" a coping skill to you and/or try it outside of our classroom, he/she is beginning to generalize that skill to real world situations! Although none of us likes to see our children experience frustration or strong upsets, please try to look at these things as opportunities for practicing the coping skills we have worked so hard to learn. Rather than feeling upset that a problem occurred, celebrate when an attempt to problem solve it takes place. The problems children may encounter will not go away, but with practice, your child can develop the skills that will allow him/her to be much more resilient.

We have begun to work on our Insect Life Cycle unit. We've learned that an insect has three body parts (head, thorax and abdomen) and six legs. This week we read about ladybugs (actually beetles!) and wrote about ladybug facts. Here are some of the things the kids wrote about ladybugs: they are oviparous, they eat 50 aphids a day, they have hard outer wings to protect their fragile flying wings, they are insects, they lay eggs, and they smell with their antenna. We've also introduced the words egg, larva, pupa and adult. These words will be heard again next week when we talk about butterflies. We expect our caterpillars to be in school next week! They have been traveling in the mail this week and we are anxious to meet them!

We have also been working on some of the things we'll be sharing with you on May 31st. Our End of the Year Feelings Celebration will be held at 2:00 and all family and friends are welcome to join us. We hope you can come!

Think Spring

We've been working hard on our Oviparous Animals unit. All of the children are able to name an oviparous animal, a mammal and a viviparous animal now. Today we made bird's nests to eat - they were yummy! We expect our caterpillars will arrive during the week following spring break and we will begin our Insect Life Cycle unit then.

Farmer Schmidt, a wonderful friend to our class, will make a visit here on April 25 with some of her farmyard birds.

We'll all go to the Outdoor Center on May 11 for our field trip. We'll send permission slips home later in April.

We will be working with Ms. Momeni's class on an end of the year Feelings Celebration Program - we hope you will all be able to attend! It will be held on Thursday, May 31 at 2:00 here at Loon Lake. We want to share some of our social skills learning with you, and we think you'll be pretty proud of us too!

Exciting News!

We have exciting news to share with you, which is why we look so happy in this photograph! We just learned that our classroom and Ms. Momeni's classroom were awarded a Mini-Grant from the Foundation for Excellence. This Mini-Grant was written to help defray the cost of a visit to the Outdoor Center this spring, and will pay for our school bus and most of the program costs! Ms. Momeni's 3-5th grade students will participate in the Adventure Team Challenge program, and our K-2 class will experience 3 science programs: Spiders, Insects and Camouflage. We will go on our trip on Friday, May 11th, and because of the generosity of the Mini-Grant, we will only need to collect $5.00 from each child. We have attended programs at the Outdoor Center in the past and they have been excellent for our students. The staff there does a great job accommodating our needs and focusing on our goals. We will be working on an Insect and Life-Cycle unit after spring break, so these programs will provide wonderful enrichment. In addition, this is a terrific opportunity for our students to take their social skills learning into another environment. We'll send permission slips home closer to our Field Trip Date, but I wanted to share this happy news with you now!
We have completed our Dr. Seuss unit with great love for all of his books! This week, we read several books by Beatrix Potter - we enjoyed them as well. We are also beginning a mini-unit about oviparous animals. Ask your child what that means and ask him/her to name some oviparous animals. This mini-unit has included a lot of discussion about all kinds of animals, and we've been using words like mammal, reptile, amphibian, bird, etc. This unit will be a nice lead in to our insect unit in April.
We'll end the week with a Skills for Learning lesson about how to handle being knocked down or bumped. When children assume that someone is behaving towards them with hostile motives, they are more likely to retaliate with aggression. We'll practice how to stay calm, how to look at the other person's face to tell if maybe it was an accident, and how to talk through and solve the problem in a calm way. Your children have grown so much in their ability to look at faces and correctly "read" them - this skill alone goes a very long way in developing empathy. I also notice that as empathy increases, anxiety decreases in our students, which is a great thing!

Lot's of Dr. Seuss and handling disappointment...

We read "Green Eggs and Ham" and cooked some up for ourselves! Some children thought they were great, some thought they were disgusting! However they tasted, we all agreed...they sure were GREEN! We've enjoyed many other Dr. Seuss books this week, and they've helped us understand a lot more about rhyming words. When we read "The Foot Book" we practiced word opposites, another tricky skill. Our Skills for Learning lesson this week was about disappointment. We looked at photographs and heard stories about feeling disappointed. We played some games and role played different scenarios. We have steps we can follow when we feel upset or disappointed:
* stop
* put hands on belly
* breathe
* think about what you can do to get calm (bump it out, self-talk, talk to an adult...)

I would like all of you to try to give your children some practice with this at home too. When you say "no" or don't give your child something he or she wants/wants to do, you're giving them a wonderful opportunity to practice this real life skill. Have your children ANTICIPATE when they might not get the choice/answer they want and may need to calm down. REINFORCE their behavior with specific feedback: "I noticed you calming down when you didn't get the book you wanted. Now you are ready to choose a different one."

March Reading Activities

This month our school will be involved in many reading related activities. Our class loves to look at and enjoy books, and we start most days off reading books in our book boxes. We'll read many Dr. Seuss books, and complete a book about many of his books to share with our families at home. All of us will sign a reading oath, and I know that many children are also reading books at home and filling in the Reading Log.

Each Friday, students may join in with a special building wide reading activity. All of these are optional, but may be fun for your child to do. I've listed these special Friday activities here:
March 9 - Read a Hat Day! Wear a hat to school with WORDS on it.
March 16 - Read a T-shirt Day! Wear a t-shirt to school with WORDS on it.
March 23 - Read a Bottle Day! Bring a water bottle with WORDS on it.
March 30 - Bring a Flashlight Day READ IN! Bring a flashlight and we'll read some of our books in the dark!
(It is OK to add some words to a hat/t-shirt/water bottle if you don't have one with words on it. For example, you could tape or pin a paper with words on it onto a hat or t-shirt.)

Last week really flew by! The class came back well-rested from Mid-Winter break. We were able to complete our American symbols unit and finish our book, "Peace Week in Mrs. Ellis' Class". The kids love seeing their names and photos in this book.!

We were surprised by the power outage and the day off of school on Wednesday, but we worked hard to make up for lost time. We completed some leprechaun crafts and writing, and began decorating our door for Reading Month. We read the book, "How I Became a Pirate" and got very excited about pirates. We made parrots and we're going to make pirates for our door. We also celebrated the birthday of Dr. Seuss, and for the next few weeks we'll be reading many of his books.

We learned about "belly breathing", naming our feelings, and waiting for something in our Skills for Learning lessons. I continue to be so impressed by the great job your children are doing with their Home Links - thank you for your help with them! Amazingly, ALL of our students are now on Level 3 or higher on our Coping Skills Rubric!!! This means that ALL of them have been observed using a coping skill when frustrated or upset or to solve a problem. This shows incredible growth this year - and we still have several months to go!

The highlight of our week was attending the Variety Show on Friday. Our own kindergartner, Shua, played a wonderful piece of music on the piano. We were all so excited and proud to see her performance.