Whew!
What a week! Everyone is doing marvelous at getting into our routine. Thank you for helping them remember to bring their folder back to school (fyi - the folders did not go home on Friday).
This week we concentrated on the letter "L", learning about each other, and did lots of things with lemons and limes. Thank you Weinstein family for sending in our first Wednesday alpha-snack. The kids (and teachers!) loved the lemonade and lemon-poppyseed muffins! Thank you in advance to the Gollhofer family for volunteering to bring in next week's "F" alpha-snack and thank you Elizabeth Evans for signing up to be our first Friday reader.
If you can, stop by and take a look at our work in the hallway. This week we made tie-dyed shirts (paper) by blending primary colors. We used liquid watercolor and instead of stroking a brush we used a downward stamp motion. The kids were very excited to see that when you mix primary colors together you get a third color. Once the shirts were dry, the children cut them out. Cutting is a great activity you can do at home to help strengthen those little hand muscles and work on skills such as eye-hand coordination. I encourage you to have a pair of kid-friendly scissors and a place for your child to cut - paper of different weights and textures, play dough, sand paper, straws, etc. are all good things to have on hand. Remind them to be safe (cut when sitting down with bottom in chair) and to hold their scissors properly (thumb in the thumb hole, scissors straight). Cut with them, they would love it! After our shirts were done we made our faces using mirrors, paper plates and yarn for hair. The kids did their own gluing (cutting and gluing - we do a lot of that). Squeezing the bottle and controlling the amount of glue is another skill to practice. Last we interviewed each child about what they "liked" (nice "L" word). Check us out, we're in the hall.
We follow Hand Writing Without Tears at Saint Aidan's. This week we built the letter "L" with sticks, made the first page of our alphabet book by painting the letter "L" with Legos, practiced writing "L" with chalk and wet sponges, wrote the letter "L" in powdered lemon flavored jello, and practiced writing the "L" in our workbooks. We also pulled objects out of a bag and sorted them by letter sound - objects that start with "L" in one bin, other letter sounds in another. For fun we made lemon and lime prints using paint and real fruit.
This week we conducted our first science experiment using lemons and limes. We wanted to see if we could get more juice from a lemon if we rolled it until it was soft before cutting. One table rolled their lemons the other did not. We took turns squeezing the juice from our lemons and then compared the amounts. Our conclusion was it didn't make a difference (this year!). We then cut and squeezed our limes which we found was much harder to do than the lemons. Our second experiment was to see if the lemon juice and/or the lime juice would react if we added baking soda. First we added baking soda to water which had no reaction. Then we added it to the lemon juice which had a huge reaction! We did the same with lime juice and last combined all our juice together, got a larger container and increased the baking soda. Perhaps you heard us, I'm sure the rest of the school did!
Yesterday we painted with watercolor and discovered our names magically appeared. We also went on an "L" hunt and found the letter "L" hidden all over the classroom. Each child found two and then added them to our giant lemon on the wall. We ended our day by playing in shaving cream scented with lemon and lime jello powder. That was HUGE fun!
This quote from one of our classmates made us laugh, "First dough now this? How do you guys come up with this stuff!"
Next week we move on to the letter "F". Be prepared for paint from fingers to feet!
Enjoy your weekend.
Laura Carbone
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