Weekly News

Fall always brings a renewal of playground excitement.  On Monday, we watched as the neighbors’ yard crew used three different leaf blowers to move an enormous collection of leaves into a pile for removal.  Although the dust was high on the upper playground, we were able to watch in comfort from the lower, nature playground.  The large pile of leaves inspired us to take a look at the many leaves lying around on our own playground.  We found that in addition to the acorns that we’ve been collecting for a month, there are maple seeds, insects, and mushrooms hiding within the ground’s leafy blanket.

The children found two of the school rakes and began to make their own piles of leaves.  It was interesting to see how the students grasped the handles of the rakes.  For some of the children, this was their first experience raking by themselves.  Others appeared to be well-seasoned, lawn care specialists.

We had to work together to devise strategies for pile jumping, however.  It seems that sometimes people want to make a pile of leaves simply because they like to clean-up and build a big pile.  For these children, having others jump in and redistribute the pile was devastating.  Others, of course, just wanted to jump in any pile they could find.  After a bit of social negotiating, we decided that you could only jump in a pile that you helped to build and only after you checked to make sure that it was a “jumping pile”.

When the lack of rakes became an issue, the children discovered that they could build the piles using their hands and feet as well.

News from Señora Sewald

In Pre-K Spanish we have learned how to greet each other in simple phrases like “How are you?” and different responses like:  I’m fine, so-so, bad, happy, sad and mad. We also have learned how to say “My name is” in Spanish. And we are working on learning the days of the week and the numbers 1-20.

Learning the colors has been great fun. We sing the color song that has 13 different colors with different movements for each one.

We have also learned to name some geometrical shapes and some parts of the head like mouth, ears, nose, eyes, hair, face, neck and head. We tied colors, head and shapes together and made funky heads with colored geometrical shapes.

Most recently we have been studying the opposites: up/down, right/left, cold/hot, fast/slow, yes/no, big/small, black/white and open/closed.

Pictures from P.E. c/0 Ms. Brand