Thursday, September 29, 2011

Welcome to the New School Year!

Welcome to the 2011/2012 school year!  I'm so excited to continue working with all of the children in the classroom.  We made some wonderful progress last year, and I can't wait to see what we will be doing at the end of THIS school year! 

Making "trains" with the Legos!
We're so lucky to have welcomed Miss Dawn AND Miss Kelly officially to our classroom as teacher associates!  Dawn has worked with the children as a long term teacher associate sub for some time, but now she's here for good! 
We LOVE our car ramps!
Miss Kelly comes to our room from Children's Village West.  She was a teacher associate there for several years.  We're THRILLED to have two wonderful teacher associates full time in the classroom again! :)
Oh, just ignore the fact that Miss Pam gets a headache from hearing the "bugs" dance on top of the drum! :)
Of course, the children are as excited as ever to explore lots of sensory items.  This week I brought in apple pie scented playdough.  We were able to use all of our playdough tools and were even able to pretend to "feed" the puppy dog some of the apple pie playdough!

It's tough to get a clear photo of a child swinging!
We've been reading the book "Mouse Paint".  Wednesday and Thursday, we did a bit of a mouse coloring experiment!  Our little mice made from coffee filters, jumped into some colored water and came out colored!  We explored how the mice mixed the colors to make new colors!

Thursday, we explored making bubble "snakes"!  This was a fun experiment that ended with us making lots of colored bubble prints on paper.  We each had a bubble snake blower (water bottle with the bottom cut out and a washcloth placed over this).  For the children that don't yet have enough strength to blow the bubble snakes themselves, I provided a battery operated bubble snake blower!


We also began exploring bird seed in our sensory table.  We used our measuring cups, spoons, bowls and natural objects to explore different ways to move, mix and measure the birdseed.