Phyllis laid an egg at Group!

Farmer Schmidt came today with her chicken and her duck. We learned all about girl and boy chickens and ducks and we were able to see their feet and feathers up close! We learned that birds have feathers and lay eggs and many birds can fly.  Farmer Schmidt also talked with us about butterflies and moths and brought us a moth cocoon for our classroom. Now we have chrysalids and a cocoon to observe! She told us some stories and had us all do the chicken dance. The children were wonderful - they were able to sit, listen and participate for the entire program. The most amazing thing of all was what happened in the chicken cage - Phyllis loved our class so much that she laid an egg! It was a beautiful white egg that was still warm!

Chrysalids!

We arrived to school to find that our 5 caterpillars had been replaced with 5 chrysalids! This meant that we needed to remove them from the small jar they had lived in when they were caterpillars. We moved them into a large and roomy case so that they will have plenty of room to fly around when they become butterflies. We could see the old skins that the caterpillars had grown out of.  We talked about what it might feel like to be in a chrysalid for about 10 days, and 3 of our students volunteered to become chrysalids to try it out! We worked as teams to wrap them up - it was a lot of fun! We read a book called Waiting for Wings which is what we need to do now... we need to wait and watch for our butterflies too.

On Wednesday morning Farmer Schmidt will be here with some ducks and chickens - we always love her visits!

Being a problem solver

These are our caterpillars after eating all week long - they are over one inch long now, and beginning to crawl up to the top of the cup they are in. This is a sign that they are getting ready to become chrysalids.

This week we had a great lesson/discussion about friends and empathy for others. We practiced looking at another child's face and thinking about how they might be feeling. We are getting really good at being problem solvers, so we tried to think of different ways we can react/interact with our classmates. We also talked about some of the ways "friendly"people look and sound and what they do that makes people like them. The class is very interested in this topic right now -we often review our "Model Me Kids" DVDs to show us exactly what to do around other children.

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!