The mice will play!
We had a great time today with the big kids. Miss Carol
and I (Cortney) were flying solo, but the kids did not even miss a beat. In fact, we
understood why Miss Ellen is always shocked when it is time to leave. The day
was over before we were able to finish all that we wanted to. But I will share
with you all that we did manage to fit in.
We started the morning at our sensory tub counting to 10
with blocks and bears to prepare ourselves for the rest of the day's
activities. We then moved on to calendar where we quickly covered the days and
months before the Boys told me all about the "sound families." I am
usually with the smaller kiddos, so the boys had to explain to me all about the
sound families and their different names. It was impressive to see how much
they have learned!
Afterwards, Miss Carol started preparing us for the 100th
day of school with a reading of "100 School Days" by Anne Rockwell.
In the story, a school teacher starts the first day of school by giving a
student a penny to put in a jar. It continues from there, with a penny going
into the jar each day. On the "big number" days (10, 20, 30......) a
child from the class brings in that number of items. This included leaves,
pennies, trains, ect..... The boys took turns counting to these big
numbers. To help us learn counting to
our big numbers we also watched a video on you-tube called "The Big
Numbers Song" by kidstv123. The story continued until the class had filled
the jar with 100 pennies.
In art we followed up on our 100 day theme by having the
boys make "counting to 100 mats". They each had to glue 10 circles
with the number 10 on it to their mats. They then counted out 10 pennies for
each circle and finished up by counting to 100 by 10's. As you can tell, we had
lots of 10's today.
Finally, we took the last few minutes to help
"teach" Miss Carol all about "warm fuzzies", "cold
pricklies" and our "buckets", since she was not in school for
these lessons. You should all be very proud of your kiddos. They really
understood these concepts and were able to give great examples of each to Miss
Carol. Even the ending of our "100 School Days" book helped reinforce
this lesson. At the end, all of the classes sent their jars of pennies to a
town where a hurricane had happened. When I later asked the kids about this,
they were able to tell me is was a "warm fuzzy" thing to do. But Miss
Carol's favorite example was when I asked Evan how he could show a warm fuzzy
and he turned and gave Miss Carol a big hug!! What a perfect way to end a great
day.
Here's to a weekend full of warm fuzzy, bucket filling
times! Ms. Cortney
