Classroom No. 1 - Mrs. Rosen and Mrs. Germany Wald

Classroom 1 is learning all about trees. We have looked at and walked on roots. Have you ever hugged a tree? We all did and it feels bumpy and rough. Take time to look high in the sky to see the branches and leaves. We'll be working on leaf paintings, tree rubbings and fall wreaths. There are so many changes to observe in the world around us during the fall season. We've started wearing jackets and have noticed the weather is cooler. We've also been collecting brightly colored leaves, acorns, pinecones and horse chestnuts. Of course, we've been reading loads of books and singing songs about fall. Here's one of our favorite songs: Leaves are falling all around, on the rooftops, on the ground. Leaves are falling on my nose, on my head, my hands, my toes. Hurray for trees, fall and classroom 1!

10/21/09

Classroom No. 2 - Mrs. Ashe / Mrs. Alonso

Classroom 2 has had such an amazing school year so far!  By popular vote, we are now learning about Bears and Hibernation. The children really enjoy learning new facts about bears and why they hibernate in the winter. They learned that three out of the seven different species of bears live in North America, which are Black Bears, Brown Bears, and the Polar Bears (Alaska). After learning this, we decided to focus on learning about these three species of bears. We have been reading lots of fun books, creating beautiful art work, and having a great time with bear games and songs in our classroom. Some of the activities we have been working on include; polar bear drawings using white crayons on blue construction paper with googly eyes, a life-size brown bear cub made with recycled coffee grounds, we created our very own bear story entitled "Diane The Special Bear" and then made illustrations to go along with the story which you can find on the bulletin board in our reading center, and we have also constructed a bear's cave in which we have been taking turns resting. Our related arts this cycle is art with Mrs. G. We have learned about different artists and the art they created and then we created our own renditions of the artwork. Our next related arts class is choral music with Mr. Danna Banana and the children can't wait to see what he has in store for us. We are fortunate to also have a garden study class with Mrs. Laura Marchese. During our time with Mrs. Marchese we learned all kinds of cool things about nature and plants. We learned about how important it is to recycle and now have our very own recycle bins and compost bin which we empty into the schools big compost bin that is located on our playground. We planted an amaryllis plant and we are keeping track of the growth as well as making still-life drawings weekly. We have made leaf cuttings and placed them into cups with water and watched them take root, we have also helped clean up the garden, raked leaves that had fallen on the ground, and planted bulbs that will bloom in the springtime. We are off to a great start and we anticipate an exciting and rewarding school year!

1/21/10

Classroom No. 3 - Mrs. Caputo, Mrs. Davis and Ms. Ruiz

The school year is in full swing. The children are excited to arrive each day and begin their "work." We have focused on activities that challenge their social, emotional and intellectual growth. The class has been engaged in emergent writing lessons and visual-spatial projects working together in pairs as well as in whole group and small group activities. All of these activities are working towards building a classroom community. We will continue to work together each day. We have set high expectations for this school year and one of the most important is to be respectful of one another and reflect on our own actions. This will help to become life-long learners with a strong sense of character. We are looking forward to designing a seasonal classroom newspaper, journal writing, pen pals, book buddies and an author's tea. We anticipate great things from your children!

10/22/09

Classroom No. 7 - Ms. Hodges and Ms.Austin

The children in classroom 7 have a vast desire for exploration and knowledge and so we boarded an airplane and traveled across the equator and to take a closer look at the rainforests of South America. We traveled thousands of miles to explore and learn all we can about this beautiful area of the world.  We decided to create a rainforest right in our own classroom and as we continue to add more and more elements we are really beginning to feel like we are living there.  There are four levels to the rainforest:  the emergent, the canopy, the understory and the forest floor.  The emergent layer has the tallest trees and some animals make it their home. The children created a very tall tree out of paper and they created a harp eagle.  In order for her to live in our tree we built a nest out of real sticks and leaves just like the harp eagle would do it. In the emergent layer we also find tropical fruit bats that live there in large colonies called camps and they play a big part in pollinating the rainforest by dispersing seeds.  You can find them in our classroom tree hanging upside down.  After spending some time in the emergent layer, we moved down to the next level called the canopy.  This area is home to many rainforest animals and can be very busy and noisy.  Many of these animals spend the majority of their time living in the canopy and they never even touch the forest floor.  After reading about this layer in books and seeing photographs, the children decided that we would need to make lots of trees, flowers, fruits and animals to make it look realistic.  We created more trees and then added some flowers and fruit to attract the toucans and the sloths.  We learned new words such as nocturnal, diurnal, carnivore, and omnivore.  We took this opportunity to learn interesting facts about sloths, toucans and black howler monkeys. Did you know that the sloth moves very slowly up and down the trees and spends most of the time sleeping or eating?  Did you know that the toucan has a cool way of eating? They throw their heads back to catch berries in their mouths. The voices of the black howler monkeys are amplified and can be heard almost five miles away. They use their voices to communicate with one another and to mark their territory.  So, if you hear howling coming from classroom seven, don't be surprised!  It could be the black howler monkeys or even us!  These monkeys love to swing on vines and so, of course, we added vines and lianas so they can be comfortable in our rainforest. The children were surprised to see that some of the fruit in the rainforest can easily be purchased at their local supermarket. We were able to enjoy pineapples, bananas, kiwi, mango and even coconuts.  The canopy is very beautiful and we have so much more to learn there.  We will be moving down to the understory and forest floor so that we can continue our explorations and continue to transform our classroom into a lovely display of all we have learned.

10/27/10

Classroom No. 8 - Ms. Constantino and Mrs. Smalls

We are moving along in Classroom 8!  Our friends just completed their final Music and Movement class with Ms. Maya and Mr. Reggie. Though we will miss playing the African drums and exploring music from around the world, we are very excited to meet Ms. G and create gorgeous works of art with her during our next related arts cycle!  Welcome 2010! We had a great deal of help celebrating the new year with Classrooms 9 and 12 during our New Year Pajama Party!  We enjoyed making banana and chocolate chip waffles, eggs and fresh blueberries with whipped cream. With a new month and a new year came a new poem and our friends love Maurice Sendak's January poem: "In January it's so nice while slipping on the sliding ice to sip hot chicken soup with rice.  Sipping once, sipping twice, sipping chicken soup with rice!"  We are working on recognizing our first names in print and learning to hold scissors and cut straight and curved lines.  We have also been creating beautiful winter scenes, frosty snowflakes, and pine needle paintings! We are so excited to see what adventures the new year will bring us in Classroom 8!

1/21/2010

Classroom No. 9 - Ms. Macklin, Ms.Carter & Ms. Skowronski

We just finished celebrating our new year with our Annual New Year Pajama Party with classrooms 8 and 12. We all wore our pjs (teachers too) and made as well as served up a very filling snack of homemade waffles, scrambled cheese eggs and beef sausages! Yummy. We played music, read stories and dressed up with plenty of pretend play going on. Mrs. Brown made waffles with Max, Anisa, Dakota, Clementine, Magdalena, Susan and Violette. They made Banana- Chocolate chip waffles using a waffle iron that twirls around on a handle so that our waffles cook evenly. Over in room 8 Ms. Constantino, Oscar, Deven, Jack,Tnai, Kyra and Zane helped with cracking our eggs and mixing in the cheese for our yummy cheese eggs. Ms. Macklin microwaved the sausages while taking pictures and videos in between the cooking. Mrs. Muchinueta, Mrs. Smalls and Mrs. Carter supervised, played Mr. Potato Head, solved puzzles, built with blocks and read stories while the cooking took place. Before we sat down to eat Mrs. Muchinueta read the story The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, while Mrs. Smalls and Mrs.Carter set the tables. Next, we washed hands and sat down to eat, but before we ate we recited a poem we learned from classroom 8. It goes like this: We like bread and we like butter, but most of all we like each other! Then the munching began and all the bellies were content. Our waffles were topped off with blueberries and whipped cream provided to us by Joseph's mom. We've also been talking about things that are reflective, shiny, bright, dull and nonreflective. We are talking about the earth's rotation around the sun and how it affects the temperature on our planet. We will begin exploring at what temperature liquids freeze and thaw as well as outdoor winter sports like ice skating by freezing sticks in ice cubes and watching them skate around the floor as they melt in our much warmer room.

1/26/2010

Classroom No. 10 - Mrs. Eaves and Ms. Adefioye

Can you believe it? Classroom 10 children have been in school for over 80 days already! Oh have they been busy!  We started our first Related Arts class with Danna Banana! He taught us about the word "melody" which means a song can be sung to the same tune but using different words. There were lots of giggles to songs such as "Will You Please Stand Up?", "The Scary Monster Train" and the infamous "I am Not Silly!"  The children also sang songs which required them to respond by echoing back what they heard.  They used their bodies to clap/tap to different rhythms that Danna Banana played on his guitar. Just the anticipation of his visits put smiles on everyone's face. November was also a season of preparing for winter and giving thanks for our family and friends. We began by exploring the topic of quilts. We talked about how quilts first start out as fabric squares that are sewn together to be made into one.  We discussed how quilts usually tell a story and have meaning. We read quilt stories and put together a collaborative family "thankful" quilt.  We also celebrated "National Bread Month "by serving challah, Irish soda, chocolate chip banana, homemade whole wheat and molasses oatmeal for snack. The snacks were delicious! Then we talked about how animals prepare for winter. Our discussions began with the "squirrel." We made a drey; which is a squirrel's home; out of a cardboard box.  The children were so excited they could hardly wait to look for dreys on the playground!  Another big focus in room 10 has been making sure the children capitalize the first letter in their name and write all the other letters in lower case. We are proud to say that the children are doing so well that they are writing their first and last names properly! Want to know what else we did in November? We planted our tulip bulbs for spring! The children used shovels to help Miss Laura scoop out the dirt and place their tulip bulbs "belly button" side up, burying them in the dirt. Stay tuned to our newsletters to find out when the tulips have bloomed.

We had Miss Maya for Creative Movement as our second Related Arts class. The children listened to music from other countries and pretended to be animals that lived in that part of the world. They also learned how to recognize parts of a music scale such as the whole, half and quarter note as well as play different rhythms on the drum. The children did a unit called "Festival of Lights." They learned how the holidays are celebrated in many countries and that most holidays use some type of light in their celebration. Several parents came to talk about how their holiday is celebrated. The biggest event of December however was our gingerbread house party!  After their favorite songs were sung, the parents and children began creating their graham cracker gingerbread houses which were decorated with all types of candy. Each house was unique. The party ended with the reading of the story Gingerbread Baby, by Jan Brett.

December has brought a lot of talk about snow. The children created a bulletin board scene after hearing the story, Snowmen at Night, by Carolyn Bushner.  Each child designed a snowperson which was put on a dark blue piece of paper to represent the night sky. White plastic garbage bags were turned into snow people which were made out of torn newspaper. The snow people sit proudly in our snow cave in library area.

2/2/2010

Classroom No. 11 - Ms. Santiago and Mrs. Flowers

Classroom 11 has been having such an amazing year! Since the beginning of the school year, we have begun to vote on topics that we are interested in learning about. The first topic that we voted on...FOOD!  During this unit, we discussed food and nutrition and engaged in a variety of educational activities.  We created charts with nutritious and not nutritious foods, painted beautiful still life drawings, combined ingredients to make delicious blueberry muffins, and transformed our dramatic play center into a restaurant serving delicious and nutritious foods!  We each also shared one fruit to create a friendship fruit salad.  As we presented each piece of fruit, we discussed its health benefits, such as the vitamin C rich oranges that help us to not get sick, bananas that contain potassium which helps to keep us hydrated, and the blueberries that are full of antioxidants which protect our cells and keep our body healthy.  After learning about each fruit, we cut them up and mixed them together and added a sprinkle of cinnamon to taste... It was so delicious!  After the holiday season, we began the new year with a new topic! We voted and decided we would learn about DINOSAURS!  We have discussed what we already know about these prehistoric creatures, created a web with what we would like to learn about them, and have begun to explore the Mesozoic Era.  So far, we have learned about the Triassic Period (the earliest of dinosaur times) and a few of the first dinosaurs to walk the Earth.  Learning about the Plateosaurus, an early herbivore, and the Coelophysis, a hollow-boned carnivore, has been very interesting. Painting the hollow bones (paper tubes) of the Coelophysis was so fun and we look forward to building its skeleton!  We have also built dinosaur habitats using blocks and engaged in several writing activities as well.  We can't wait to further explore the land of dinosaurs!  Since enjoying art class with Mrs. G., we have been exercising our large muscles and having a great time with Mr. James! Classroom 11 is having such a great time learning, growing and exploring together!

1/25/10

Classroom No. 12 - Mrs. Muchineuta and Mrs. Brown

What a great start we have had to our year! We are all working together to build a classroom community where we can all learn and play! We had fun getting to know each other in September by singing name songs and playing fun games together. Some of our favorite projects were painting together and creating large body tracings with our friends. As we discover the different areas in our classroom each day we also learn where our friends interests lay. Many of us have started to create very elaborate block creations in the block area and create complex play scenes in the kitchen area; a favorite is a restaurant where one friend takes an order and another one cooks. Together the class has made play dough for all to enjoy and cooked delicious applesauce. We have become aware of the changes in our outside environment and are now learning about the season of fall. We have taken a walk and gathered leaves that have fallen, made a mural using the colors we now see outside, and created leaf people that we used to write our own imaginative stories. We are excited to explore together and grow through the rest of the seasons of the year too!

10/22/09

Classroom No. 13 - Ms. Muller, Ms.Galella and Ms. Ruiz

Classroom 13 is enjoying the winter season!  We have discussed many things about this beautiful season such as the temperature changes, the weather changes, the environmental changes, and the different clothes we must wear like sweaters, hats, scarves, and gloves to keep us warm.  After the first snowfall we wondered how snow was made from “the sky.” This was the perfect opportunity to explore the water cycle.  Our discussions and experiments helped us to understand the water cycle by introducing us to new words such as evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.  Evaporation is when the water turns into a gas and goes into the air; condensation refers to when the water gases build up and form clouds, and finally precipitation is the extra water which comes down from the clouds such as rain and snow.  We collected snow from outside bringing in one part of the water cycle (precipitation) and we placed it in our science center.    We then conducted an experiment to find out how long it would take for the snow to melt.  (It took one day.)   Throughout the remainder of our exploration of winter we have many wonderful projects planned.  The children have created gorgeous snow scenes and snowflakes using their fine motor skills to shape and decorate them.  They light up the classroom in all of their winter glamour!    Currently, we are learning about animals found in cold climates. We have touched upon polar bears, seals, and penguins and have learned that polar animals live in the frigid North and South Pole. Polar bears love to swim, eat fish, and keep warm with their fur and layers of fat called blubber. We were amazed to find out that they also have a lining of thin black skin underneath their fur that also keeps them warm when the sun is shining.  Seals are similar polar bears since they love to swim and eat fish, but they have two unique characteristics - they have flippers to help them swim and they lay on their side so that they are not too cold while lying on the ice.  Since our exploration of these polar animals is generating so much interest we think that our next topic of exploration will be other types of animals.   We can’t wait to learn about the creatures that live in the wild, in the zoo, and in homes. 

2/3/2010

Classroom No. 14 - Ms. Waugh and Ms. Caccavale

We are happy to say that everyone has adjusted very well to our school and classroom environment and are truly enjoying being together each and every day.   One of our ongoing projects is our partnership with one of the fifth grade classes from Hillside School. These fifth graders come to our classroom on Mondays for 45 minutes and read with the children.  The children really benefit from the time spent with their book buddies and the book buddies benefit from their time with the preschoolers.  During the month of February we will take a walk across the street to visit their classroom. The children are all excited to see what their school and classroom will look like.

In deciding where road of curriculum would take us, the children were asked to express their areas of interest.  Some of them included: an exploration of the inside the body, water, sharks and scary things.  The class embarked on a study called Food and the Body.  We learned the importance of eating healthy and what food does to and for the body.  We learned about the journey of food through the body and we identified different parts of the body and what they do. The children cut out a life-size replica of their own body and put in the digestive system. To culminate this unit we had a healthy food (well mostly anyway!) luncheon with our parents in December.

We have just begun a unit on Bears and Hibernation.  Some of the facts that hope to learn about are what different types of bears look like and the difference between animals that hibernate and animals that sleep. We will also identify real bears, bears that we read about in stories and toy bears.  As the unit progresses, the children will name our class stuffed bear. Each child (and his/her family) will have a sleepover with the bear.  The family will photograph and write about their experience with the bear for our class book.  We will also have a bear day when children will bring in their bear and we will have a variety of activities with the bears.

1/26/2010

Classroom No. 15 - Ms. Showell, Ms. Cataldo and Mr. Randy

We've had a very busy fall completing two units of study, Our Beautiful Bodies and Homes and Families.

Our Beautiful Body unit had us huffing and puffing while we conducted relay races on the playground. We then listened to our heartbeats before and after we raced and noted the difference. We used our lungs to blow bubbles and then used them to paint a picture! We blew through a straw to move watercolor paints on paper. We explored our five senses by conducting smell and taste tests. We created a texture collage from items we found on the playground, took a walk and recorded the sights, then closed our eyes and shared the sounds we heard.

To celebrate the changing season, we conducted apple taste tests. We tasted Granny Smith, Macintosh and Golden Delicious apples and charted our preferences. We loved using an apple peeling gizmo to peel, core and slice apples for the apple 'pockets' we baked. They were yummy! We also used apples to make beautiful apple prints to decorate the classroom bulletin board.

Our unit on Homes and Families had us exploring our school neighborhood, in search of various types of homes. In our neighborhood we found -- garden apartment buildings, apartment buildings, condos, single family homes, multi-family homes and an inn. Our classroom families were invited to come to class and share their holiday traditions. We created some lovely beaded pipe cleaner snowflake ornaments with a classroom mom who makes ornaments as a family tradition. We also enjoyed having selections from the Nutcracker Suite performed for us live, by a classroom mom, who is a violinist and her friend, who is a bass violinist!

We have also enjoyed our Related Arts Specials. Ms. Maya and Mr. Reggie had us˜visiting locations around the globe as we listened to World Music.  We were so excited to play Mr. Reggie's didgeridoo and bass violin and we loved expressing our physical creativity when we moved like the various animals inhabiting the countries we visited. The highlight of this Related Arts Special was learning to drum on the beautiful African handcrafted wooden drums. We learned how to play whole, half and quarter notes and learned musical terms like crescendo, rhythm and beat. Following Ms. Maya and Mr. Reggie's Music and Movement class, we sang and got our sillies out with musical muse, Danna Banana. We sang on the Scary Monster Train learned a silly ABC song and traveled to outer space on a Supersonic Rocket Ship!

The children have voted on their next unit of study.  We have created an animal shelter in our dramatic play area, stocked our aquarium with carefully crafted, colorful fish, and we can't wait to see where we'll go next!

We have had wonderful parent involvement this fall.  Thank you for sharing your many talents with us. Parent visits are very special times the children really look forward to.  Your support and generous donations of your time, classroom supplies and snacks are very much appreciated.  Please join us any time to share a bit of yourself -- we love having visitors!

Best wishes for a happy, healthy New Year!