We have a fairy door in our room!

Last Friday, we had a big surprise in our room! When we came up to group, we noticed a tiny, little door. We did not know what it was, or who was behind it. We wrote a note and put it up by the little door.

On Monday, we found a tiny little envelope by the door! The writing was really small, but we were able to read it. We found out that two fairies, named Nissa and Dewdrop, live there! They told us that they like our cozy, quiet classroom and that they love to listen to our music and singing. They wrote another note asking us about our coping skills - they wanted us to explain them so that they could try them out too.

  

This week we began our Fairy Tale unit. We learned that fairy tales have magic and both evil and kind characters. Usually, fairy tales begin with "once upon a time" and they almost always have a happy ending. We read the traditional version of Cinderella, and then compared it to an Indonesian version (with a crocodile in it) and a cowgirl version. 

This week in our Skills for Learning lesson we learned that people can have different feelings about the same thing. Recognizing that people can feel and think different things about the same situation is an important part of social perspective taking. We played some games and watched some children on a DVD to help us understand this concept.

We had a great Parent Support Group Meeting last Thursday evening. I always love having this time to talk with our families about issues that are important to all of us. We plan to meet again on Thursday, December 6 at 6:30 in Room 114. I hope that many of you will plan to join us - our meetings are meant to be supportive and a way to share strategies that will help the children in this program. 

Fire Safety and Handling Frustration

We spent several days this week talking about fire safety and firefighters. We read many books about firefighters, and wrote about their gear and equipment in our journals. On Wednesday, Mr. Ellis came in with some of his firefighter gear and everyone was able to try it all on. It was very heavy to wear!

We prepared a little snack this week -pumpkin pudding. It was fun to stir the ingredients together.

We talked about frustration during our skills for learning lessons. We are beginning to notice clues that someone else is frustrated, and how we can help. More importantly, the children are beginning to understand the clues that THEY are feeling frustrated. This is the time that a coping skill can help. Students suggested "deep breathing",  "take a break", and "get adult help" as good coping skill choices. Some older students also named "self-talk" and "bump it out". We can help children actually use coping skills :
           *anticipate when something might be frustrating, and rehearse which coping skill to use
           *prompt your child to use a coping skill during the frustrating moment
           *praise your child for his/her attempt to use a coping skill
           *model using a coping skill when you feel frustrated
Sometimes, we as parents, want to help our children avoid frustration. But, frustration is a wonderful opportunity to practice newly learned coping skills. Feeling frustrated is part of learning new and challenging things -we are working hard to help give your child tools to use, so welcome those opportunities to practice them.

Don't forget - our Parent Support Group Meeting is this Thursday at 6:30 in Room 113. Hope you can come!

Owls and Empathy

This week our Skills for Learning lesson was about identifying feelings -both in ourselves and in others. We practiced matching facial expressions with the correct feeling, and we talked about how important it is to notice the "look" on someone's face so that we can think about how that person may be feeling. This skill is a beginning step in developing empathy. I have noticed more examples of empathy with our students this year, which shows that some students are developing a more mature awareness of feelings. It is an important skill for behavioral change as well. When students are able to identify the facial expression and feeling that another person has, they can use that information to adjust their own behavior. We will have many more lessons on this topic in weeks to come.

We spent several days talking and learning about owls. Our vocabulary included words such as nocturnal, bird, feathers, prey, roost and owlets. Ask your child to tell you all about owls!

I made a mistake last week in our blog! Our Parent Support Group meeting will be next Thursday, October 18 at 6:30-7:30. I hope many of you will come and join us - we will meet in our classroom for this first meeting.

I wanted to let you all know just how much we enjoy working with your children! This class is very special -it is exciting to see how they are using coping skills and adjusting their thinking in order to solve a problem.  Below is a fun photo of our hallway bulletin board -all of the kids are inside the jack-o-lantern!

Happy Halloween from Room 113 - all in a pumpkin shell!

Pumpkins and Appleheads!

We finished all of our apple head people and they look so cute. We are working on writing stories about our people now.
This week we read about pumpkins, learned about the life cycle of a pumpkin and made pumpkins. Our classroom looks ready for fall!
We practiced being assertive when we need to ask for help. We learned that we need to use a calm voice and respectful words. Sometimes we need to wait while an adult finishes helping someone else.
We have begun to work on learning how to write our last names. We will also be working on learning our phone numbers, addresses and birthdates. This is something that you could also work on with your child at home. It will take time and practice - I would suggest that you work on one thing at a time.
This year our school will have our Halloween parade and party, along with the Fun Run, on Friday October 26. Your children should bring a costume to school (not wear it) on October 26. Our school parade will be in the afternoon, and we will have a simple Halloween party afterwards. If you would like to send in something to eat or drink for our party, just let me know.
Our first Parent Support Group meeting will be held in our classroom on Thursday October 18 at 7:00. I hope many of you will be able to join us!

 

On Friday, we ended our week with a visit from Miss Qonja. She read a great story to us and was able to talk with the kids about the book. It was wonderful to have her spend time with us!

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.