Happy Hot Tuesday!

Through a group effort here at WF, every child in our classroom has an
Electronic Portfolio (EP) started and it has been emailed to parents. A few notes about the EP’s:

• Our goal is one weekly for each child. However, some weeks you may get more than one and others may not have any.
• We will email your child’s entire file in pdf format each time rather than page by page. It is easier for us to store them this way. When the file gets large enough that it gets “slow”, we’ll start a new one.
• Be sure to scroll down to see the latest entry in your child’s EP each time you get an email.
• Our goal is to email the EP’s as they are written, but some may come later.
• The email address that is used to email the EP’s is not checked with any regularity, so please direct any responses to our personal emails. Otherwise we may not see that you responded.

 

This morning we exercised some fine motor muscles by stringing small beads into necklaces and bracelets. Our older friends strung the beads onto the yarn while our younger friends used their pincer grasp to pick up one bead at a time, identifying colors.

Using our bath sponges we washed and scrubbed appropriate body parts while singing and dancing to “Bubbles in the Bathtub” from the album Funky Fish Party by singer David Chicken. An easy tune to download!

Afterwards, friends requested “The Cheesehead Special”; a song we sang last fall. We created an eye/hand coordination game with the foam cheese hat: everyone sat in a circle and passed the ‘cheesehead’ around. When the music stopped, whoever held the cheesehead, stood up, put the hat on and did a funky cheesehead dance. Friends played cooperatively, rhythmically and imaginatively!

At journal time we assessed what we have learned about race cars:

*You always have seat belts, stay on the track and if you break down you go to the pit crew for help.

*You drive them.

*Go Carts go fast and have lawn mower motors.

*You can go really fast and if the car is damaged, you are still safe.

* You have to go fast AND keep your car on the road.

*You go fast.

*You could race against sheep.

* You need helmets and fireproof suits.

We started brain storming a name for our Wee Friends car race.

For lunch we had whole wheat egg noodles w/ shredded carrots & kidney beans, mixed vegetables, and fruit salad (that included the fresh strawberries picked by our preschoolers at the farm yesterday!).

Have a great day!

CREEPY CRAWLY BABY SPIDERS!!!

This week the children have been closely examining the baby spiders that Tami captured off of her deck at home. Yesterday afternoon, we released the spiders into our garden. Hopefully, we will end up some pest control by adding the spiders!

The children watched with great interest as the baby spiders fled their captivity in the jar and ran toward the freedom of our vegetable plants. The spiders seemed to be flying because they were moving with such speed and their webs were so small that they were not very visible. The children were very close so many of them ended up with a baby spider climbing on them!

To better investigate their webs, Tami tinted the jar with blue powder so that the tiny web patterns would be visible. The children were amazed that in just 4 days, the baby spiders had filled the entire jar with webs! (And some of the children were just very fascinated with the blue tempera powder that Tami used to tint the web!)

Below are some photos from today!

We celebrated Melinda’s 60th Birthday this afternoon! She was surprised and very happy with the box of 60 cards. Thank you to all that contributed them.

The last picture is what happens to the first candle by the time you light 60 of them!

Here’s a pictorial look at our morning as our tumbling groups rotated!

 

For lunch we served cream cheese and shredded carrots on whole wheat tortillas, apple sauce and Mexican style veggies.

Have a great day!

METAMORPHOSIS!

 

Late last summer, Taylor brought a caterpillar to school that she found at home. Wee Friends created an aquarium home for it. Soon thereafter, the caterpillar wove a cocoon and stayed there until yesterday (we think!). While in the science center, Tami noticed the caterpillar had become a beautiful moth! We studied the moth and then took it to its new home in the crab tree!

Inside, a small group of older friends studied the parts of a race car and hunted around the different WF learning centers to see if they could create a car with various materials of the same shape.

After they collected/compared their materials, they attached them to a Kleenex box to create a 3 dimensional race car.

Tami worked with our new readers, listening as they read aloud.

Our garden is growing! Thanks to our Master Gardeners Paulina and Amy Crosson, we will soon be eating from our own garden!

Today for lunch we served black beans and rice, shredded carrots and corn, and banana/apple fruit salad.

Have a great day!