Dr. Seuss and 100 Days of School!

We have enjoyed rhyming with some Dr. Seuss books and activities this week. Monday is Dr. Seuss' birthday, and students at Loon Lake are encouraged to wear red, black and/or white clothing, just like the Cat in the Hat. March is Reading Month, and there will be some special days for students at Loon Lake. Each Friday will be flashlight reading - I will have some flashlights on hand for reading with and students are also welcome to bring a flashlight from home.

We also talked about March weather - will it come in like a lion or a lamb? We are all anxious for spring weather so we can get back outside to play!

Here is our number line - we were excited to see it grow to the number 100 this week. We feel 100 days smarter too!

This shirt has 100 eyes on it!!!

We will have a new student start in our classroom on Monday, so we will become a class of 10!
I want to remind you that there is no school next Tuesday, March 3.
We are excited to let you know that our 3 special education classrooms received a generous grant from the WL Foundation for Excellence to help us fund some classroom field trips. We are looking forward to a field trip on March 24 to Wonderland Lanes for bowling and an outing in the spring to the WL Outdoor Center.  Thank you to Dr. Cohen for writing the grant for us! More info and permission slips will come for the bowling field trip.

We will have our Parent Support Group Meeting the following Tuesday, March 10 at 6:00. Our topic will be the Zones of Regulation. We use this new program with our students and have experienced a lot of success with it.

Learning about the United States

We have been practicing the Pledge of Allegiance and learning about our flag and other symbols for our country, including the Statue of Liberty and the Liberty Bell. We learned about President Washington and President Lincoln and also about the White House.

In our social skills lessons we talked about the feeling of disappointment and things we could do or say when we feel disappointed. We have also been talking about kindness - this is a very kind group of children, and I see daily acts of kindness right in our classroom. Developing empathy at such a young age is a wonderful thing, and they frequently attempt to look at things from another classmate's perspective. 

Miss Marlowe did some fun music with us on Thursday. We used instruments for some songs and followed her under a parachute rainbow for another. 

We loved everything about Valentine's Day - from making our mailboxes, delivering our valentines cards, and finally, opening them up during our party! What a great day it was!

This week we measured ourselves and compared how big we were with an emperor penguin. (Adult emperor penguins are 4 feet tall.)

 

 We learned about polar bears and were finally able to answer our question, "Do penguins and polar bears live in the same place?"  We can now say that they live at opposite ends of the world and would never meet! We learned that sometimes we have to change our thinking when we get new information.We made polar bear paws, which are about 12 inches long, and compared them to our feet.

We had a lot of fun doing our blubber experiment. We made a "blubber glove" (lard inside plastic bags) and wore it when we put our hands in ice water. The blubber glove kept that hand warm, just like blubber keeps polar animals warm.

Next week we will make our valentines mailboxes. Children usually love to bring valentines to pass out - all your child needs to do is sign his/her name on each card. It is not necessary to write the names of each classmate on the outside/or the envelope - your child will just drop a valentine into each mailbox. We have 9 children in our classroom and 3 adults.

All about penguins...and a new coping skill!

I apologize that it has taken us awhile, but we do have another Parent Support Group meeting scheduled for Tuesday, March 10. Our topic will be the zones of regulation and I hope many of you will try to join us!
We began our study of polar animals with a little geography. We learned about the North and South Poles and the equator. We learned that penguins live south of the equator. Although many do live at the Antarctic, some species also live where it is quite warm. We learned that penguins are great swimmers, but cannot fly. They live in groups called colonies. Penguins in very cold regions huddle together, rotating in and out of the center of the huddle to keep warm. We tried huddling too!

We watched some video clips and read some books to learn how penguins hatch their eggs and care for their young chicks in such cold environments. We practiced holding an "egg" on our feet just like penguins!

We worked very hard to create some great penguin artwork.

We learned and practiced a new coping skill. It is a calming sequence that is repeated 5 times when feeling upset. The sequence goes like this: Squeeze your hands together; close your eyes and rub your head; then rub your legs. Repeat 5 times.  Here is a photo of the coping skill:

This calming technique incorporates both a physiological component that helps to calm the sensory and nervous system as well as a cognitive component to calm the mind. It can help students regulate their emotions - to help get them out of the "fight or flight" state that the body goes into when reacting to intense situations. It takes a few minutes to complete the sequence, and that often is just enough time for a student to feel calmer and back in control.

This week we have challenged ourselves with some partner reading...we practice reading the books in our book bags to a friend. We all felt proud to read to someone else!

Our new classroom technology!!!

Friday evening our interactive smart board and document camera was installed! There will be so many ways that our class will be able to use this new technology to increase our learning opportunities. We started out on Monday morning with some wonderful brain breaks to get us moving and ready to learn.

I was able to use the new document camera to do our read aloud books so that we could really zoom in and see the pages! 

We were able to use the interactive white board to do so many of our learning activities this week - I don't know who was more excited, the kids or the adults! I overheard one of our students say that this was, "the best day ever!" It certainly opens up many new avenues for learning for all of us!

We read more books about winter and snow, and created some beautiful art work about winter birds. We also mixed up a birdseed recipe so that we could make bird feeders to hang outside for the birds.

On Wednesday we attended a music assembly. It had  Miss Marlowe (our music therapist) and her band, The Swingset Mamas. Miss Marlowe always gets us moving and participating, and all of the kids did a wonderful job. She invited us up to help her with two of her songs and some of the children went on up! Afterwards, they were able to talk a little with the band.

No school on Friday or Monday....up next, a little polar study about penguins, walruses, and polar bears. To get ready for this unit I asked the students if they thought penguins and polar bears lived in the same place...here is what they think now. We'll ask this question again after we do some research about these animals. Most children said that they thought penguins and polar bears do live in the same place.

Happy New Year!

It was wonderful to have the children back at school -we missed all of them! We got busy right away with some winter stories, activities and art! We read two Jan Brett books - "The Mitten" and "The Hat" along with an Ezra Jack Keats favorite titled "The Snowy Day" to really get us in the winter mood! We enjoyed a book called "Cold Snap" but didn't expect our area to be hit with a real cold snap! Here are some of our creations...

We are continuing to work on the zones of regulation and really zeroing in on noticing when we may be in the yellow zone. You may notice that this is the zone where your child begins to get teary, argumentative or irritable. All of those things are normal feelings/behaviors for kids -we want to help our kids name those feelings and then use a coping skill to solve the problem and get back to the green zone. Don't rush in to solve the problem for your child - the yellow zone can be uncomfortable to watch, and it should feel uncomfortable for your child. This is his/her signal that he/she needs to do something, even if it is just to ask for help. There is so much new research out there about children and self-regulation, and your children are actually learning and using these skills every day!
The WL technology upgrade has continued, and we have a new phone. The phone number is the same -  248 956-4033, but I have a new voice mail extension number. That extension is 64070 if you need to leave a message. Please bear with me as I get used to this new phone!
We were very lucky to have a college student volunteer in our classroom in December while she was home on break. Emily Crawford is a student at Michigan State University who hopes to become a special education teacher. She enjoyed your children so much, that she returned to help us again this week!

This week the wind chill/temperature made it too cold for outside recess, so we had centers during our recess times. Here are a few of our centers: 

Next week we will continue with winter/snowmen activities. There is no school on Friday January 16 or Monday January 19.