Thursday, January 8th 2009

The Magic Trains:
1.) Read a wonderful book entitled On the Farm, worked with comprehension, the concept of beginning, middle, end, and generated our own list of animals. Then we took a motor break continuing the theme, and acted out how animals on a farm might walk. Danielle went over the alphabet and practiced writing letters.
2.) Played red light, green light in Fitness with Mr. Dan. We also had a great game of tag and practiced movements, including skipping, hopping, crab walk, and backward walk.
3.) Sang some of our favorite songs such as “Five Green and Speckled Frogs” with Ms. Deanna during Music.

The Diener Dinosaurs:
What a top-notch Thursday! Today the Diener Dinosaurs...
1.) Read a book together called The Mitten and then created our own mitten books!
2.) Created “shapeflakes” - snowflakes out of rectangles, triangles, and circles!
3. ) Continued our scientific investigations - today we used our 5 senses to investigate our storage room! Then we wrote about what we saw in our lab books.
4.) Had fitness with Mr. Dan - we played Red Light, Green Light, acted like human bowling balls on scooters and knocked down pins, and practiced shooting hoops! Then we had music with Miss Deanna - we used our scientific skills to investigate different sounds and instruments.

The Mighty Dieners:
1.) Ms. Kathy helped us with our handwriting today! Some of us worked on keeping our letters on the baseline and some practiced keeping our lowercase letters between the midline and the baseline!
We are getting new handwriting folders next week that will have specific handouts with handwriting goals we each need to work on. In addition to our handwriting class, we will work from our folders for 15 minutes every day starting next week!!
2.) During our OT Groups, we worked on sequencing and following directions by playing “Follow the Leader” and “Simon Says”.
3.) In Math, we continued to work in our Calvert Math workbooks! Some worked on adding one more to a group of objects, while some worked on coloring specific shapes by a given color and then counting the number of each shape.

The Golden Owls:
1.) In Math we are continuing to count in doubles (7 + 7), plus one (7 + 8), and minus one (7 + 6). We are using dominoes, dice, flashcards, and whiteboards creating a positive and fun learning environment.
2.) In writing we are brainstorming using webs, drafting using lots of details and examples, and also revising our work to manifest a masterpiece.
3.) In speech with Ms. Jenn we are working on semantic associations and listening comprehension skills using games and role playing activities.

From the Office:
Next Friday, January 16th we will have our first Pizza Friday of the year. I will need a few parent volunteers to help that morning/early afternoon to get all the pizza and drinks set-up and distributed to the four classes. Please contact me if you are able to help out. Thanks in advance! Leah