Hello, Bluebird Families!
We have been busy Bluebirds, all wrapped up in learning about rainbows, spring, frogs, and ducks!
I’m not sure we will ever fall out of love with rainbows! We get so excited about the rainbows that appear in our classroom each morning now that we have sprung forward! We painted a beautiful rainbow mural to hang in our classroom. We made a loose parts rainbow with all of the tops we have been saving from our squeezy snack pouches. We enjoyed reading The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister and loved exploring and building with different colored blocks and tiles on the light table. We even played games with a rainbow parachute and worked together to build a rainbow house that was big enough for several of us to get inside at once!
We continue to be fascinated as we observe the frog life cycle first hand! We have watched excitedly as the eggs became tiny tadpoles, which grew into much bigger tadpoles, which are now growing their back legs! We love our visits with them and can’t wait to see their front legs appear and then their tails shrink! I think the children will remember this process forever! We did a cut and paste activity to create a frog life cycle and have also made a book that explains the stages of a frog’s life. We have read many books about frogs and discussed which books are fiction and which are nonfiction. We giggled together over the Frog and Toad books! We played creatively with frogs in playdough and in a small world set up. We also made our very own frogs with big back legs for jumping and curly tongues for catching flies! Ask your children about the frog songs we learned: “Eight Green and Speckled Frogs” and “E-Ah Went the Little Green Frog One Day!”
We have taken a nature walks to find signs of spring and observed the changes on our playground, back hill, and picnic shelter area. We painted watercolor still lifes of forsythia that I brought in from my back yard. Some of us enjoyed it so much, we decided to make flower books, drawing and labeling our favorite flowers. We have been enthusiastic puddle jumpers on the rainy days and chased butterflies, picked dandelions, built nests, rolled down hills, and quietly watched birds on the sunny days.
Our math and reading skills are exploding! I love watching the children’s eyes light up when they master a new concept or decide to extend something they have learned to challenge themselves! We played Math-O, a game we played at the beginning of the school year and it was fun to see the change in the depth of their understanding two digit numbers! They have also started making some very impressive number facts and coin combinations for our number of the day each morning during calendar time. The children are getting more confident in their ability to sound out words. It is so exciting!
Your children are so creative! They have loved putting on puppet shows for each other and making all kinds of amazing things out of paper! They have made shoes, surfboards, costumes of all kinds, a functional gumball machine, scuba gear, and even a turntable!
We have recently spent some time learning about ducks. We started with one of my favorite duck books, Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey, and have read many fiction and nonfiction books about ducks. We learned about how ducks don’t get wet because of the special oil on their feathers. And did you know that ducks have very few nerves in their feet? That is why the cold water and ice doesn’t seem to bother them.
Next, we are moving on to chickens! We are so excited about the eggs in the incubator can hardly wait for them to hatch!
Thank you for sharing your children with me!
Anna
