It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the Tugboats!  As we explored the letter X last week, the children began paying much more attention to an often-missed letter.  We investigated pictures of x-rays, imagining a camera that could take pictures through our bodies and comparing the difference in human bones and animal bones.  Our most exciting adventure occurred last Wednesday when we returned from the playground to discover that our classroom had been visited by a pirate in our absence!  Captain Jack Sparrow left us a note and a map explaining that he had hidden his treasure somewhere at Harbor City School.  Our task was to find 12 Xs hidden around the room and to arrange them in order to read the clue that would lead us to the treasure.  When we arranged the Xs by the numbers printed on the backs, they read “When your friend Gigi brings food to school, I make sure it stays nice and cool!”  That could only be one place:  the fridge!  Inside, we discovered a chest filled with (chocolate) gold coins!  In this project, the children worked in pairs and practiced using supportive language.  They also had to work together and use their problem-solving skills to figure out how to arrange the Xs, and then determine the meaning of the clue.

This week, we welcomed 5 new friends to Harbor City School!  This brings our community up to 25 families, more than double our initial 11!  The Tugboats continue to shine as ambassadors for our school,  as they welcome all new members into the classroom, share their favorite toys and activities, and encourage new relationships.

We’ve been investigating the letter Y this week and enjoyed eating yellow pineapple for snack and decorating our Ys with yellow yarn.  We also spent a lot of time talking about one of our favorite Y words:  yucky!  On Tuesday, we made a  Yucky book, in which each child made a page of our book by illustrating something she or he thought was yucky.  We saw many yucky garbage trucks, trash cans, banana peels, and poops.  After our book was compiled, we read it aloud and agreed that it was, indeed, very yucky!  We also explored some yucky sensory projects:  oobleck (cornstarch and water), clean mud (soap, water, and shredded paper), and dirt dough (coffee grounds, flour, and salt.)  Each table held a different sensory project, and it was a huge hit!  Our group of students is very active and energetic, and sensory projects are a great way to channel that energy and focus.  It always amazes me how long a child can sustain his or her attention when playing with the simple combination of cornstarch and water!

I think all of us are a little confused and cautiously enjoying this unseasonably warm weather, but we at Harbor City know just what to do with it: take advantage!  We were planning to talk a lot about weather this week, but aside from how warm it is and why that is odd for the month of March, we’ve only been able to say one thing all week; sunny, sunny, sunny!  Every day this week, we’ve spent as much time outside as possible.  Without the extra time it takes to put our coats on, we’ve managed to get outside a full 15 minutes earlier than we typically do.  The Tugboats seem to be obsessed with soccer lately, so we’ve taken advantage of that interest in the afternoons as a way to avoid the crowds at the playground.  We love to head to a large grassy area with the cones and a few small balls and just run and kick to our hearts’ content!

We also enjoyed our outside time with a project contributed by one of our parent helpers this week.  Marcela, Sofia’s mom, brought a large cardboard playhouse for us to build on the playground!  The kiddos loved “helping” the grown-ups assemble the structure and even though our paint markers proved to be too messy for us to decorate, they still loved exploring the space.  I think there is something inherently fun about introducing a new element to a common routine.  We visit the playground daily, but adding a strange new structure seemed to turn it into a whole new space!

Another exciting element of W week has been our classroom visitors, worms in the sensory bin!  The small sensory table has been full of soil this week, as well as some carrot peels and egg shells to feed our wiggly friends.  The children have been using plastic spoons to gently scoop the worms, then placing them in clear plastic cups or their hands for closer examination.  It’s been a great exercise to help them slow their bodies and use extreme caution with such small, delicate creatures.  None of the children has been afraid or nervous about the worms either!  Some children are disinterested, but most of them love to dig deep in the soil and get dirty!  After this week, we’ll add them to our plot in the Bremen St. Community Garden to help nourish and care for the soil in which our new plants will grow.

My favorite W project this week was Thursday’s watermelon project.  Each child was given one half of a paper plate and used pink and green paint to bring their watermelons to life.  We talked about the white and black seeds we see in watermelons that we eat.  The white seeds are usually okay to eat, but we spit out the black ones!  Each child also had a card with his or her name printed on it.  They counted the letters in their own names, then counted out the corresponding number of seeds.  The wet paint acted as a glue, so we stuck the seeds on and voila!  Each child had a unique and individual watermelon!

There are never dull moments here at Harbor City School, and this week certainly proved that!  With quite a few of our families on vacation this week, we anticipated a slightly quieter-than-usual week.  We should have known better!  We began our week decorating our letters of the week with vegetables.  Each child was given a sheet of vegetable pictures to cut out and paste onto their large V.  For those students who wanted an extra challenge, we offered sheets with fruits and vegetables.  Their task was not only to cut out the fruits and vegetables, but also to sort them and only glue the veggies onto their letters!  All of the preschool children benefited from fine motor practice, as some of our younger Tugboats are just learning the proper way to hold and use scissors.  Others are mastering the coordination need to cut around, as opposed to through, paper objects.

Tuesday saw more beautiful weather, extended play time outside, and a festive art project in which we used vegetables as paint brushes!  The children had an opportunity to explore potatoes, corn, onions, green beans, asparagus, and broccoli in their whole forms.  We smelled them, used our fingers to feel the different textures, and talked about how each vegetable was different from the rest.  Next, we dipped the vegetables in red, yellow, or blue paint and experimented with the different kids of marks each one made.  Who doesn’t love playing with their food?!

Wednesday brought a dramatic dip in temperature that none of us were prepared for or too happy about.  We ventured out into the gray to discover that the small playground, which we enjoy when the large playground is full, was extremely noisy: there was a large drainage truck parked next to it!  The Tugboats just adore trucks, especially less common ones like this, so we spent a few minutes observing it and hypothesizing as to what its job was.  Ultimately, we decided that this truck needed some competition for noisiest thing on the block and held our own Loud Contest!  We warmed up our voices and shouted, screamed, and squealed as loud as we could, but to no avail.  That truck would not be quieted!  We returned to school to enjoy music class after our one-week break.  The slightly smaller than usual group, coupled with the children’s growing expertise with the class structure and expectations, made for a very smooth, quick class.  Many of the children are becoming quite adept at replicating rhythms and matching pitch!  Both of these tasks are a developmentally-appropriate challenge, not out of reach but not an expectation, for children of the preschool age group, and really highlight the many different learning styles of our students.  Those who are naturally more musically inclined show a sense of ease with singing and rhythm sticks, while others are enjoying the practice and exposure.

We continued our veggie exploration on Thursday as Erin, our parent helper, brought us gardening tools and peas to plant in our plot at the Bremen St. Community Garden!  The children loved digging holes, planting peas, and watering them in preparation for the spring.  Back inside, we used play dough and seeds to create low-relief sculptures!  Some children made faces, others made flowers, and others still made abstract works of art.  Everyone enjoyed the feel of pressing the seeds firmly into the dough, which is such a different sensory experience than drawing or painting in two dimensions.  We also made a bar graph of our favorite vegetables!  It turns out, some of our friends were a bit creative in their responses: as parents saw the graph at pick-up, we heard a lot of “Wow, she’s never even eaten that!” and other similar responses.  Perhaps they’ll try them now!

For project time today, we switched away from vegetables to another V-topic that many children at this age adore: volcanoes!  Thanks again to Erin and Kristy’s curriculum support, we were able to build a play-dough volcano around an empty bottle, which was loaded with vinegar and soap.  Once we added some baking soda, the contents of the bottle erupted into a foamy, lava-like mess!  The Tugboats also watched a short video of an actual volcano eruption and noticed how our experiment was similar, it was also much more fun and safe than a real volcano!

What a crazy weather week it has been!  We began the week with a wind chill of 8 degrees, peaked at nearly 70 degrees on Thursday, and have ended up with temperatures in the 40s.  We’ve tried to take advantage of the benefits of the cool as well as the warm weather with a variety of indoor and outdoor activities.

The Tugboats kicked off U Week by decorating our letter of the week.  We painted our Us in a very unique way:  upside down, underneath the table!  Kristy and Peter taped each child’s U to a large piece of paper on the bottom side of the long blue table.  Adorned in smocks and armed with paintbrushes, the children lay down on their backs under the table.  This resulted in some surprisingly unique paintings.  Whenever we paint our letter of the week, most of the children cover theirs in paint from edge to edge.  During this project, they were much more economical with their paint.  I wonder if perhaps they were nervous about drips?  It seems unlike them to be so cautious (why let a little mess get in the way of some good fun?!), but it’s certainly a possibility.

We also attempted to do a few art projects with items underneath the paper.  These projects were admittedly far less successful.  Without any adhesive, the objects slipped back and forth under the paper.  With adhesive, there was an additional mark left by the tape, as well as some unsavory stickiness left on the tables.  Although these projects didn’t turn out as well as we had planned, it can be beneficial for the children to experience unsuccessful projects with their teachers.  It allows us to model for them problem-solving techniques as we assess why our project didn’t work out, what we’ve learned, and how we can do better next time.

As the temperatures rose, we spent plenty of time outside soaking up the sunshine!  We taught the Tugboats one of my old favorite Field Day games, Over/Under.  We lined up in a circle and passed a ball first over our heads, then under our legs.  It was a little confusing at first, but once we got the hang of it, we were really rolling!  Prepositions can be quite difficult for kids at this age, so games like this help them to visualize specifically what “over” and “under” really mean.  We also did a fair amount of pretending outside on the playground.  Below, you’ll see a group of fabulous ladies, sunning themselves, imagining they are on the beach!

We are so excited to welcome our newest Tugboat, and just in time for T week, his name is Trip!  All of the children are excited to see our number of male students grow.  They bring such a great addition to the classroom dynamic.  During our dance parties, for example, many of the girls love to put on ballet skirts, tutus, and other dress-up clothes.  Trip quickly encouraged all of the children to dress up for dance, helping the other boys to don cowboy hats, hard hats, and even a police riot helmet!

T Week has brought a variety of T-themed projects, including Eri’s contribution of origami T shirts!  Each child was given a piece of origami paper that Eri and Myle’s big sister had folded into T shirts.  They also selected a circle of paper for a face, then glued their shirts and faces to paper.  Using markers and crayons, each child created his or her own self portrait.  They turned out beautifully!  Some of the children even went so far as to match their crayon selection to their T shirts.  And we all know, the Tugboats never turn down an opportunity to use a glue stick!

We also developed a new game we call The Secret Sack.  At Circle Time, we passed around a small canvas bag with a toy inside that began with the letter of the week.  Each child had an chance to feel the bag without peeking and try to guess what was inside based upon the shape!  We Secret-Sacked a turtle, a toothbrush, a train track, and a tractor!  Relating the shape of the toy to the letter of the week was a stretch for many of the Tugboats, but they did a great job of analyzing what they felt inside the bag.  On the day we used a toothbrush, for example, many children felt the bristles and guessed a paintbrush.  They are quite conceptual thinkers!

Another fun project that involved thinking conceptually was our Tin Turtles, which are now proudly displayed above the cubbies!  Kristy created this beautiful sorting and color grouping activity using tin pie plates and paint swatches.  Each child was given a pie plate with a color taped to the center, and there were 4 different colors at each table.  In the center of the table, we placed several panels of the 4 colors in a large pile.  The students had to work together to sort the panels into color families, because each panel was a different shade or tint of the base color.  This required the children to think broadly about colors in groups, as opposed to simply matching.  Once they were sorted, they glued the panels onto their “turtle shells.”  The resulting turtles are so colorful and vibrant, it feels a little bit like Key West at Harbor City School!

Today, we are practicing social and life skills with a special guest educator:  Peter’s dog, Charlie!  Charlie is a border collie mix and has a lot of classroom experience working with children with autism to practice safe, appropriate behavior with animals.  He is patient, sweet, and never says no to a good belly rub!  The Tugboats today have enjoyed petting Charlie, brushing his long fur, and even helping to hold his leash on a walk around the neighborhood.  Many parents begin to consider bringing pets into their homes when children are around this age, so Charlie serves as a great introduction for students who don’t already have exposure to dogs.  Practicing with a safe dog and responsible adults helps them to learn the appropriate ways to approach and interact with new animals.  They learn to ask before touching and to use soft, gentle hands.  Exposure to dogs in a comfortable environment like this contributes to safe behavior and can help to decrease the potential for fear later in life.