Treasured reading time is a favorite time of the day. We get to read and discuss books with our friends. Sometimes we “read” the illustrations or retell favorite stories. Other times we notice letters and sight words. Some students make up their own stories.  We also love discussing interesting photos and illustrations in books.  We are developing a love of literacy every day!

This afternoon we went on a nature walk. We examined the bark of various trees to determine similarities and differences. We also did some bark rubbings.  When we returned to school we worked on adding to our creative play forest.  We added our bark rubbings to the trees, painted clouds and a sun, and added leaves to the tree. Our creative play room is looking more and more like a forest every day.

During centers some of us invented jet packs!

View more photos in our Nov 2-6 Photo Gallery

Here are the highlights of our week:

-We modified our rat maze and let the rats try again. Hazel got faster but Alice did not complete the maze.
-We worked on turning Creative Play into a forest. We even made trees and rivers.
-We invented fishing poles and went fishing.
-We did pumpkin seed math.
-We had our first Music Makers session with Ms. Shelley
-We read with our college buddies.
-We went on a nature walk to collect leaves, pine cones, acorns, and more.
-We did leaf art.
-We used digital microscopes to examine nature items.
-We found and examined two caterpillars.
-We had our Halloween parade.

View more photos from this week in our Oct 26-30 Photo Gallery

Today’s Blog Message
Written by Michael
Dear Families,
Today we decorated a forest jungle in Creative Play. We put rivers with blankets. Then we wrote our family message. We timed the rats going through the rat maze. 
Love,
Michael

Today we welcomed a new student into our classroom community. It was great to meet you today, Petey!

This morning we got to test our rat maze. We put Hazel in the rat maze first. We quickly found out that our maze had a slight design flaw: the walls were too short. Hazel immediately climbed over the block wall and out of the maze. We had to keep putting her back inside the maze walls. With our help she reached the muffins at the finish line in 2 minutes and 19 seconds. She got faster her second time through the maze.  It only took her 1 minute and 19 seconds the second time. Alice had more difficulties getting to the finish line.  We had to help her along about twenty times.  We decided to modify our maze. We discussed changes that we wanted to make to our maze and during center time several engineers were working on it. We are working on making the maze slightly less complicated for Alice, and we are making the walls taller. We are going to continue remodeling the maze tomorrow and time the rats going through it again soon.

Here’s a peek at our modified rat maze. We are still in the process of making taller walls.

We began turning our Creative Play room into a fall forest. We watched a video and looked at photos of woodland habitats. We began to plan what things we would like to see in our forest. We will continue to learn about fall, forests, leaves, and forest animals in the upcoming weeks. 

VIew more photos from today in our Oct 26-30 Photo Gallery

We started our morning with Community Free Choice Time.

For lunch we got to eat the Stone Soup and pumpkin muffins that we made. Yummy!

This afternoon we worked together to design and construct a maze for Alice and Hazel. On Monday we are going to time Alice and Hazel going through the rat maze.

View more photos from today in our October 16-22 Photo Gallery