Upcoming Dates and Announcements:
Click the link to find out what’s happening at WCDS https://here.wcdsedu.com/events/
Snack Helper this week: Kemper
Next Friday is Halloween! Here is the scoop:
- Children should come dressed in costume
- 9:00- Whole school costume parade on the loop (weather permitting). Parents are welcome to come and watch!
- 9:30 Class hayrides followed by a Halloween Party in the classroom just for the children.
- 11:30 am dismissal with aftercare available until 3:00 pm. Children staying for the afternoon must have a packed lunch.
Hello JK Families,
As the children settle into their new school family, we recognize the importance of building interpersonal skills in these early days. We model sharing and taking turns, and have demonstrated the importance of expressing “I feel…” statements to each other. We began by showing the children the wide range of emotions we can feel every day, sometimes multiple times a day! We practiced making the emotions with our faces and our bodies and explained how these visual cues can help them understand how their classmates might be feeling. Happy, sad, mad, scared, excited, silly, and calm were all emotions we worked to explore this week. We took time practicing “I feel…” statements such as “I feel sad that it’s raining.” or “I feel excited for Halloween.” With time and practice we believe the children will begin to use these phrases as a way to express their wants and needs to each other. We read The Rainbow Book by Kate Ohrt to the children. It expresses the way colors can make us feel. The children were asked to match emotions to colors. Many of them said red matched anger, blue matched sad, pink for loved, and sunny yellow for happy! We also thought it might be fun to hear what comes to mind when they think of a color. This is what they had to say:
What do you think of when you see yellow:
“Sun”- Sebastian
“Golden” – Atticus
“Bananas!! – Levi & Archie
“Minions” – Sebastian
“Sun.” – Gemma
“Light.”- Avery
What do you think of when you see red:
“A hot air balloon” – Abigail
“An Apple.” – Lincoln
“A shirt.” – Brody
“I’ve got two, cherries and grapes and berries.” – Archie
What do you think of when you see blue:
“Sonic!” – Ben
“The sky!” – Sebastian
“Blueberries and the wind” – Archie
“The ocean.” – Brody
“The rainbow.” – Ripley
“A blue ball.” – Clara
Exploring Emotions
With emotions top of mind we decided to team up to create 4 class Jack-o-Lantern faces that express different feelings. Each child drew the emotion they’d like to create on their pumpkin and what color they felt represented that feeling. After all the votes were in, we divided up the class into 4 groups each with a pumpkin. Together they created a Happy, Angry, Silly/Loved, and a Scared/Spooky pumpkin. This was a great way to build teamwork and collaboration among the children. Here are the groups and their creations.
Happy Pumpkin Group: Maverick, Brody, Destry, Ben, Gemma, Kemper
Angry Pumpkin Group: Ripley, Donato, Abigail, Sebastian, Leland
Scared/Surprised/Spooky Pumpkin: Lincoln, Atticus, Avery, Levi
Silly/Loved Pumpkin: Clara, Archie, Audrey, Zuri, Nala
Halloween excitement is in the air but the changing season has captured the attention of the children as well. Our time at the playground resulted in quite a wonderful leaf collection! The trees down by the creek offer GIANT leaves that quickly turned into bouquets as we carried them back to the classroom. We decided to let the children paint them and press them into dough. They admired their texture and veins but mostly loved rolling the brayers in paint and pulling and throwing the play doh. Watching their desire to explore mediums in a more physical way inspired us to let them smash, rip, stir and throw during our next exploration time. We presented them with chalk and wooden mallets. They smashed the chalk, added water and then baking soda and vinegar to the mixture. They loved watching their concoction erupt!! We also invited the children to tear leaves and then try and transfer them to each other from one bowl to another on “the leaf train!” They loved trying all these physical ways to explore materials.
In language and literacy the children practiced the formation of uppercase and lowercase letter Ii and it’s sound. Igloo, itch, Isla, and ice cream were all added to our word web. In number sense, the children practiced writing the number 7 and worked to build numbers on a ten frame.
More Joyful Learning From the Week
We can’t wait to celebrate Halloween with the kiddos!
Have a wonderful weekend,
Miss Liz and Miss Gina