Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you to everyone who shared in our Thanksgiving celebration today! What a wonderful time to celebrate each other and be able to eat together. Aidah and I were talking and we are just so incredibly thankful to have such an amazing class of students and parents this year! Thank you for being so investing in your child’s learning and for being an integral part of our classroom family!  Have a wonderful four day weekend, and I will see our kiddos back at school on Monday, November 28^th!

This week some of our learning included…

*continuing to delve into the student’s interest and passion of cats and dogs. (I am posting some separate blog posts documenting our learning in parts.) One projection of this project has gone in the way of observational drawings. We were looking at the drawings we did when we were watching the school cat as well as Sadie, Olivia’s cat from home. We noticed that some drawings were what we think cats look like (an image in our mind) and some drawings mimicked what we were seeing right in front of us. We thought we would get some expertise in this area, and visited A.J.’s dad’s high school art room again, where he taught us how to do contour drawings. We practiced with fruit and figures, pretending an ant is crawling around the outside of the object, and we will try and put this into good use when Jamin’s dog Kyan visits us on Monday! Thank you Mr. Matthew!

REMINDERS / UPCOMING DATES

*November 24^th and 25^th: NO SCHOOL-Thanksgiving Holiday

*Thursday, December 15^th: HOLIDAY PARTY and Sing A Long 8:00-9:15- Our wonderful room parents will be organizing the party party (similar to Halloween) and then we will end with a cuddly Sing-A-Long.

*December 17^th to January 8^th: NO SCHOOL-WINTER BREAK

*January 9^th: Late Start—10:00am start for school.

Week 15 November 21 to 23

Cat and Dog Project...Part 1

“Come on little pup. Let’s go for a walk. You can go to the park to get exercise and see all the other doggies. Come and follow me.” Florence talked to Lachlan the dog as she led him on his leash of glittery beads. Lachlan responded by a “woof, woof” and some dog panting sounds.

Over the next couple of days other animal explorations began as well. In the dramatic play area the family suddenly had a dog and cat. “You need to walk me to the park so I can do all my tricks,” Marcus said from under the table. “Right after you have your milk,” Florence replied.

A “Pet Hotel” began out of magnatiles, where there were separate appartments to keep cats and dogs that don’t have homes. “They have really comfortable sleeping spots in the room. And they have food too.” Siddharth told the group. This continued into a storytelling session where real and fictional tales were told about having animals and about animal adventures.

We came together during a few of our connection times to discuss all of these animal explorations, and our project was launched! We brainstormed and the students articulated that they wanted to learn more about cats and dogs.

-How do we take care of them?

-How can we make sure they are respected and loved?

-Who has them?

-What do they need?

The students explored the library and checked out non-fiction and fiction books about dogs and cats. Through our conversations we started coming up with more and more questions so we decided to write them down. “We should also write down what we find out, right?” Arunika said after looking in depth at a book on cats. “You have to be gentle with a dog, Mei. You can’t pull too hard on their leash. Look, give your baby dog to the daddy dog.” Jamin said.  A.J. added, “I need a lot of walks to get my exercise, so we’d better keep going!”