November & December updates

Hi all,

November is over and December is here - how do the days go by so quickly? If anyone has the answer please let us know. We have been very busy in Room 107. Our natural alphabet is complete and we have used some of the letters within the classroom to write our names and those of our friends. The children have made letters out of a wide variety of materials from the art studio, recyclables and natural materials like leaves, seashells, sticks and pebbles. They are looking for letters everywhere we go, and you can often hear questions like: "who has an "S" in their name, raise your hand!". We hope they are sharing this interest with all of you. The documentation panels regarding the letter study are beginning to go up within the classroom; please stop in and check them out.

We are thrilled to say that we now have 4 digital cameras in the classroom for the children to use. One camera package was donated by a morning parent (thank you , thank you, thank you), two cameras were given to us by our parent coordinator Ms. Joan and the fourth is an older model that we had in the room. The children have each taken a mini camera class with Ms. Amy and are enthusiastically snapping photos of the classroom, the teachers and their friends. They are experimenting with capturing their friends while sitting and while in motion, specific parts of each other's faces and taking pictures of one another simultaneously. We are letting them explore the properties of the cameras a bit more before we start focusing in on incorporating their photographic perspective into our studies.

We wanted to thank everyone who participated in our two parent activity days. The first, November 5th was our parent-child activity day where everyone worked on family memory books. The children (and staff!) love looking at them. If you have not had a chance to look at the books please feel free to stop in. Anyone that has not sent in their finished book please know that it is not too late. Then on November 18th parents were invited to come in and share their favorite family memory. Some of the stories and artwork are up in the hallways in a temporary display and the rest will be shown in the weeks to come. Again, it's not too late to share your story - stop in the room or shoot us an email and we will let you know the specifics.

If your child has come home in the last few days asking for money it is for a wonderful cause. Our classroom has chosen two children from the sharing tree and we are hoping to gather enough money to purchase the requested gift for each. The children are very excited about this; though some may be a bit confused. One child told his Mom that he needed $17 for Ms. Amy! Another thinks we are buying someone a new house.

Finally, please remember that we go outside every day, and the children need to be prepared for Chicago's unpredictable weather. A set of gloves, hat and scarf in each bookbag would be a wonderful idea. As the snow begins to fall boots and snow pants are a welcome sight as well. Please feel free to keep an extra set of slippers/crocs/gym shoes in your child's mailbox or bookbag to change into when they wear boots to school.

Up-Coming Events:
Thursday, December 17th - Pajama & Pizza day at Vick (more info to come)
- Family Sing a Long at the Ag School 6:30pm
Friday, December 18th - last day of school (pm only)
Monday, January 4, 2010 - Welcome back to school.

Happy Holidays to all! Amy, Mary, Joanne & Pam

Parent-Child Activity Day

November 2, 2009

Dear Families,

This Thursday, November 5th is our first Parent-Child Activity day of the school year. We are very excited and are looking forward to spending this time dedicated to working with you and your child. We wanted to share our plan with you to ensure that everyone is prepared for a wonderful experience.
For the past several weeks we have been studying the image of the child. Some of the activities we have completed are: using hand mirrors to study our faces and draw ourselves, discussing our summer bags to learn more about one another and the types of things we like to do, finding out our whole name and the story behind it from our Moms and Dads, and learning about the letters that are in our names. Learning about the letters in our name has turned into a study of letters in our environment.
Through nature walks and delivering our flyers for our Halloween food collection the children have discovered letters of the alphabet wherever we go. The trees around Barbara Vick have given us V’s, W’s and X’s, railings on porches produce a G or an S, and wheels on cars or the tops of a fire hydrant give us the letter O. They have become so adept at finding letters that we have created a “natural alphabet” in our classroom for the children to use when spelling their names or other words. We will be using our “natural alphabet” as part of our Parent-Child Activity.
Our activity on Thursday will be to create family books that will be kept in our classroom for the remainder of the school year. The children LOVE to look at themselves and their families in any books that we have made in the past. In addition it is a great way for the children to learn about each other’s families.
Each family is asked to bring no more than 10 family photos no larger than 4x6 to put in their book. Please keep in mind that these books will not be returned until the end of the year so you might want to make copies of the photos. Also, we will do our best to make sure that no harm comes to the books while they are in our care but we know that they will be well-loved by the time they are sent home.
We will be using our natural alphabet to spell out each family’s name as the covers for all the books. If you care to bring in any stickers, mementos or other type of embellishment for inside your book please feel free to do so; otherwise all supplies will be provided in the classroom. We will have some alphabet stickers, paper cutters, die-cut shapes, decorative punches, journaling pens, etc. for your use.
Please remember that this one hour activity time is dedicated for you and your Barbara Vick child only. This hour counts as your child’s attendance for the day. Ask your child to help with the selection of the photos so that they are aware of what you will be working on together. We will be talking about this special day in class as well. We are looking forward to seeing all of our beautiful 107 family books! Any questions/comments/concerns please ask in class or email us at vickroom107@ameritech.net

Ms. Amy, Ms. Mary, Ms. Joanne & Ms. Pam

Letters, Letters Everywhere!

We are well on our way into our exploration of our names and the letters in them. The children have been noticing letters everywhere they look. On our walks they are finding letters in trees, sticks, fences, leaves and even on the sidewalk! We are taking many photographs of our fabulous finds. Today we worked on "making" our names with materials throughout our classroom. (If you have any "extra" collage supplies hanging around we would love to take them off your hands!)
Thank you to everyone who (enthusiastically) responded to our request for information about your child's name. If you have not yet turned it in please do so very soon. We are going to start asking the children the same two questions that we asked you - we can't wait to hear their answers.
Also we wanted to thank everyone for your assistance in getting the Ages/Stages questionnaires completed so quickly. We really appreciate your cooperation.
Finally we wanted to thank everyone who has joined us as Guest Chef so far this year. It is such a wonderful way for our parents to get to know all the children in the class and have fun while doing so. The children really do love this activity and always remember each other's parents after they have visited us. The calendar for November is up - grab your chance while you can! If you have any questions about what to make with the kids please do not hesitate to talk with one of us - we are always happy to share ideas.

We are Exploring....

A spider wandered into a classroom.... Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke! Actually it was the beginning of our first (possible) project of the school year. Tuesday morning a spider was found walking leisurly along the west wall of the classroom. After carefully capturing the spider a group of children and Ms. Amy took the spider outside to release him. Once the children began to talk about the spider and share their thoughts it was decided that we would take the spider back inside and learn more about it. Both the morning and afternoon classes shared their thoughts, fears and questions with us.

Here is a bit of what we talked about:
"Spiders can climb on walls." "Spiders walk on webs and go up and down." "Spiders have 8 legs" "Spiders can bite." "Spiders need good healthy food (like bugs) and drinks (like apple juice) and energy." "He needs air."

Unfortunately we did not consider the air factor yesterday when we were leaving school and our spider died. This of course opened up another area of conversation. We are currently on the hunt for another spider to study. We will keep you posted on how this proceeds.

We also wanted to say a great big THANK YOU to our first group of Guest Chefs. Last Wednesday Mr. Doug (Annie's Dad) came to make strawberry and apple mice and Ms. Brenda (Hanna's Mom) came to make personal pizzas with us - they were so brave to go first! And today we had Mr. Nick (Nick's Dad) make edible spiders and Ms. Margie made chocolate dipped pretzels and marshmallows - delicious! The October calendar is up - get a spot while they're available; they do go fast.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has tried to log in as a follower on the blog. Apparently there are some technical difficulties with this process. I am emailing the host to see what we can do to make it easier for everyone. Any questions, concerns, comments please feel free to leave a comment here or email us at vickroom107@ameritech.net . Thank you!

Week one well underway!

We have been in school for a few days now and we are all beginning to learn the schedule and a few of the classroom rules. Throughout these first two weeks we will really be concentrating on these skills in order to have a great year together. Our classroom was also chosen to be a part of a pilot program at Vick called "Calm Classroom". You will see the children practicing deep breathing, yoga poses and relaxation techniques. These practices help us relax, pause to take in our surroundings and gain a greater sense of focus on the tasks at hand. If anyone is interested in learning more about the program please let us know, we would be happy to share the information with you.
Please remember to join this blog as a follower so that we can begin to track how many families are accessing this communication tool on a regular basis. The classroom email address has also been set up; you will receive the information Wednesday at school and through an email later in the day on Wednesday. Please let us know if you do not receive it.
Thank You!

Welcome Back to School!

Hello to all of our Room 107 families! We are so happy to have seen all of you at school today. So many of our friends from last year have returned after spending the summer getting taller and taller. And it was very exciting to meet all of our new friends as well. We are happy to offer this forum for classroom communication again this year; we hope that many of our parents, grandparents or family members will use this as a tool for keeping up with classroom life and as a means of communicating with your child and our classroom staff.

Water Day Cancelled

Sorry, but due to rain and cool weather, tomorrow's water day is cancelled. We will check the weather forecast on Thursday to reschedule another day next week. Stay tuned.

David celebrated his 5th birthday in the morning class and brought M&M's for all! Happy Birthday David!

We made a few changes in our classroom this week. We now have a water table instead of a sand table. Water colors are put away and we switched to colored chalk. And the much missed playdough is back. All thanks to Ms. Joanne and Ms. Pam.

During small group, we practiced for Kindergarten by listening to directions and completed a worksheet. At meeting time we counted down to only 6 days left of school and heard everyone's announcements. We had apples for snack and played outside today.

Ms. Amy returns tomorrow from her family Colorado vacation. Ms. Mary was our substitute teacher. Ms. Pam was absent today.

Ms. Elma