Friday Follow Up-January 22, 2010

This week in science, we continued to talk about the solar system. The primary and inters classes, enjoyed learning about the Outer Planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto- the dwarf planet) by watching The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space. we created a hands on, visual representation of the solar system, by having the kids pretend to be planets and orbit around then Sun! This helped to solidify understanding the new material. The Uppers worked on their Planet Projects and reviewed planet facts in their Solar System journals.

We had a great time learning about the concept of Sink and Float in Hands on Science this week. We watched a short video on buoyancy and we conducted an experiment to see if our selected items would sink or float. We made predictions prior to the experiment and we were all surprised by some of the results!

We made some delicious creations this week during Beyond Cooking. The kids had fun creating their very own Pizza Bagels! They got to pick their own yummy vegetable toppings to make their pizza unique. While our Pizza Bagels were baking, we blended up a delicious fruit smoothie!

We continued our basketball unit in fitness! We practiced dribbling, keeping our eyes on the ball, and learning the rules of the game.

We learned a new dance called the eagle rock. You can you tube it by the Wiggles. All the kids learned the dance, except the K class.

This week in speech and language, the Uppers continued to learn about irregular past tense verbs and figurative language. Ask your child to share his or her favorite idiom with you and see what they say! Please see Jillian's Friday letter for some samples of our I AM poems that the girls created this week in Social & Life Skills group. Although it is important for us to think about what we need to work on, we also need to take time to remember our strengths. On Friday, Ms. Courtney and Ms. Deanna's Inters worked on using Give me 5 to play Look Who's Listening! We also worked on eye contact while playing Pass the Eyes.


This week in Inters music, we combine Miss Jenni's and Miss Courtney's classes together for one big music class! We played lots of fun games like Count and Move, Freeze Dance, and rhythm stick games. In Miss Barbara and Miss Abbe's class, we continued our study of composers by learning about Tchaikovsky. We watched and listened to The Nutcracker Suite. We were assigned a project to do a little bit of research about a composer to share in next week's music class!

Our letter of the week in Miss Emily's class was X. We designed our very own letters using a variety of tactile media including cotton balls, felt, glitter, macaroni, beans, and stickers. We also participated in a large movement group focusing on right/left discrimination and coordinating both sides of our bodies.

This week in Ms. Jenni's class we participated in a variety of small group movement activities that focused on right/left discrimination and spatial awareness. We continued to work hard during our weekly handwriting group reviewing "tall" and "descending" letters and practicing the correct formation of our newly introduced lower case letters "p" and "r".

This week during speech group in Ms. Jenni's class we learned all about emotions. We studied different pictures of faces and analyzed how a person's facial expression depicts a certain feeling. We also practiced making the faces we studied (happy, sad, surprised, etc..). Each student then constructed their very own face depicting a "surprise" emotion. After they put their emotion face together they were able to guess what emotion it was and present it to the class. For example, the students told about the shape of the mouth and the angle of the eyebrows.

In Art, the Primary class had a lot of fun painting with Q-tips! The materials used in this project consisted of white construction paper, black paint and Q-tips. The children dipped the Q-tips into the paint and created wonderful and very interesting designs (dots and lines) on their paper. They learned about the difference between light and dark (contrast). They have also discovered with previous art projects, that instead of using paint brushes, there are many different kinds of art "tools" to paint with , creating a variety of designs! The Uppers (Ms. Kate's class) will be concentrating on different art techniques that an artist may use. This week, the children learned how to draw "beyond the border" of their paper. This is a type of art technique. The first step was for the children to draw a large shape in the middle of their paper. Crayons and markers were then used to draw a picture, not only inside the shape, but also extending their drawings "beyond the border!" In Ms. Barbara's class, the children learned how to draw by using a grid. The children were first given graph paper which they used as a grid to create their drawing. The children then used a pencil to sketch their drawing on the grid. After this was completed, they used a black marker to outline their drawing. The use of the grid allowed the children to draw lines, and patterns in an organized manner. It became a very different and interesting way to draw!