For a short week, it has certainly been a busy one!  We began our study of the letter S by decorating capital-Ss with star-shaped stickers.  Each child was given a large S with various colored dots on it.  Using shiny star stickers, we asked them to match the color of the sticker to the color of a dot.  Once they had covered each dot with a star, we gave them sparkly silver stars to decorate even further.  What a hit!  About half of the students were able to match the colors with little or no assistance from a grown-up.  Those that did need a little extra help quickly caught on and were able to match their stars and dots independently by the end of the project.  Many of the children also had an easy time peeling the small stickers from the sheet, a task which challenged most of them just a few short months ago.  While we were thrilled with the fine motor development that we usually aim for with our weekly letter decorations, we were even more excited to see how the Tugboats used this as a learning opportunity in other domains as well.  One student whose primary language is not English took the chance to practice saying her colors in English!  She would hold up a sticker and look to her neighbor and ask, “Orange?”  Her neighbor would reply, “Yep, that’s orange!” and they would continue on about their project.  In addition to the language development, the helping student had an opportunity to mentor and teach to a friend, one of my favorite benefits of a mixed-age classroom.

On Wednesday, we enjoyed our weekly music class with Jessica.  The weather was too glorious to pass up, so we had some extra playground time that cut our music class a little short, but we all needed the fresh air and sunshine!  We came inside with renewed energy to play instruments and sing along to some of our favorite songs.  The children who’ve been to music class before were eager to share what they’ve learned with two friends who don’t typically come to school on Wednesdays.  They loved showing off the words to “Driving In My Car,” which is always a favorite!

Today we revisited the letter S with a super silly project that Liz, Isa’s mom, shared with us: spiral snakes!  The children each got a piece of paper with a spiral line drawn upon it, ending in the center with a snake’s head.  They colored their snakes with markers and crayons, emulating the stripes that many snakes sport, then practiced their scissor use by cutting along the line.  With 3 grown-ups in the room, we were able to accommodate the younger preschoolers who needed a little bit of assistance with their scissors, while many of the children confidently cut their own snakes.  Once they were finished, they held them up to see their slithering serpents bounce around the room!

One of our newest Tugboats enjoyed his first HCS music class this week, which was a hit, as always!  Those of us who have been enjoying our Wednesdays with Jessica were excited to show off how well we’ve learned the songs she’s been teaching us.  A group favorite is one we call “The Tra La La Song,” in which this children help come up with different actions we can do: “I can dance, dance, dance, tra la la la!”  After Jessica had left for the day, I came upon a small group of children during clean-up time singing, “I can clean, clean, clean, tra la la la!”  I’d say they are thoroughly enjoying our new enrichment program!

We’ve also been practicing a few projects related to our letter of the week, R.  We’ve used race cars to mix red and yellow paints around a racetrack, decorated Rs with ribbons, and collaged rainbows with bits and scraps of beautifully-colored paper.  These projects have demonstrated just how much the Tugboats have developed their fine motor skills.  Several of the children took great care in deliberately placing the ribbons very close together on their Rs, trying to fill the entire letter and doing so with purpose.  Just a few weeks ago, projects like this resulted in mostly scattered and random placement of decorative objects.  It’s so thrilling to see these advancements in their desire to sharpen their creative ideas, as well as their ability to use their hands to carry out a plan to greater detail!

As our students get older, the growing “4 Club” and the brand new “5 Club” have developed a serious interest in reading!  All of the children are confident at reading each other’s patters.  We use a unique system of labeling and organization that we use to teach the pre-reading concept that visual symbols represent words that have meaning and sound.  The 4- and 5-year olds are excited to transfer that skill to the organization of letters.  We’ve been reading a simple board book called Bright Baby First Words. Each page has a photo of a recognizable object with text at the bottom naming the object.  The children identify the object and identify the letters of text.  As they say the name of the object out loud, they begin to connect organizations of letters and the sounds that they make into words.  Watching the noticeable growth and progress that the children go through is absolutely one of the most amazing and exciting parts of teaching.  They are just so remarkable!

It’s been a festive couple of days here at Harbor City School!  As we welcome two new Tugboats to the crew yesterday, we also wrapped up our preparations for our Valentine’s Day celebration.  Everyone got a mailbox, beautifully hand-made by Grady and Erin, and decorated it with white, pink, and red heart stickers.  With their patterns pasted on the front of the mailboxes, we stored them in their cubbies, ready to be filled with Valentines!  We also made stained-glass hearts, designed by Kristy, using clear contact paper and tissue paper.  Once they were completed, they looked lovely in the windows with the afternoon sunlight streaming through.  Coupled with the heart mosaics we made last week, our classroom was decorated and ready for a party…

And party we did!  We held our Valentine’s brunch this morning, complete with heart-shaped pancakes, pink muffins, and a delicious array of vegetables, fruit, and yogurt.  After enjoying a morning snack, the children took turns decorating a heart-shaped cookie with low-sugar frosting and colored sprinkles to be enjoyed at afternoon snack.  They also had an opportunity to make Valentines in addition to the cards they had already delivered to their friends’ mailboxes.  Some children read stories on the couch with a grown-up while others raced cars and trucks around the track on the floor.  With many parents and siblings joining us, it was quite a crowd, but certainly a fun one!  The party took a scholastic turn as we headed into Circle Time (the biggest we’ve had yet!), where we read The Night Before Valentine’s Day, sang our counting Valentines song, and recited our Love Is a Circle Poem.  We also enjoyed a puzzle game in which each child had half of a heart and had to find their friend holding the other half of their heart.  By the end of the party, all of our hearts were full!

Once the party was over and our extra friends and grown-ups returned home, we tried to resume our day as usual.  We took a trip to the playground for some swinging, climbing, and running.  Our parent teacher today, Erin, had prepared an activity addressing the recent interest in mail and the Post Office.  First, Erin read Seven Little Postmen, by Margaret Wise Brown, about how a secret message travels through the mail.  Each child had a small piece of paper on which to write their message and a larger piece of paper to be folded into an envelope.  Once the envelopes were sealed with a sticker, the children attached “stamps” and wrote the to and from addresses.  The completed packages were deposited in our class mailbox, which was also made by Erin and Grady!  I think there may be a neighborhood field trip in our future…

We held our second music class today and, as expected, it was a big hit!  The Tugboats love to sing and dance; we do it quite frequently throughout the day.  While it takes a few tries to learn a song well enough to sing along, they love having the opportunity and practice to do so.  Our weekly music classes give them just such a chance!  The children were excited to hear songs from last week that they recognized and to begin memorizing them for themselves.  They were also excited to see the return of the big stretchy band that we all held onto so that we could lean way back without falling!

One of the types of songs Jessica teaches the children is called a substitution song, which means that she establishes a few verses at first, and later asks for input from the children to replace her verses.  She’ll demonstrate different physical movements, for example, and then ask the children to contribute other types of physical movements.  It’s fairly common for children to freeze up when asked to generate an idea at this time, but after one or two ideas come up, they love to chime in.  One way we’ll support them in this type of quick-thinking is to help them brainstorm ideas before they are called upon so that they have a cache of ideas at the ready.

The Tugboats are also enjoying the opportunity to play “real” musical instruments, as opposed to the toy instruments we have in the classroom.  Jessica brought egg shakers, hand bells, cymbals, rhythm sticks and a variety of other instruments whose names I’m not even sure of!  For the children who are naturally musical, this is the most fun part of class: they get to play along to a song from the mp3 player.  Many of the children are able to quickly determine the rhythm of the song and keep time along.  As a person with minimal musical talent, I find this to be especially impressive in our young students!

We had two very special guests as our parent teachers in the classroom today:  Natalia’s grandparents, Mimi and Pipi!  Natalia has told us many stories about her grandparents, so they were practically super stars by the time they arrived in the classroom this morning.  Additionally, their generosity granted us our brand new vacuum, aptly named Mark after Pipi, so Peter and I were thrilled to have a chance to express our gratitude in person.  It turns out that generosity is not all Mimi and Pipi have plenty of; they are also super energetic, patient, and fun!  The Tugboats had a blast solving floor puzzles with Mimi, building block structures with Pipi, practicing their ABCs, washing their hands, and reading countless books.  The classroom participation component of the co-op program is so valuable; we’ve seen time and again how beneficial it is to children’s self-esteem to see their parents bring elements of their homes into the classroom.  Having family volunteers other than parents is a great way to shake up the normal and introduce new elements of a child’s life that we may not have seen before.  It was certainly a treat to get to share in Natalia’s love of two of her favorite grown-ups!

We continued our exploration of the letter Q today with a quest for quarters!  Armed with our plastic cones and a large collection of quarters, we headed to the open grassy space in the park to begin our adventure.  Peter blocked off an area and distributed the quarters within the set boundaries while Mimi, Pipi and I distracted the Tugboats.  Once he was finished, we turned them loose to find 5 quarters each.  What a mad dash it was!  As expected, some of the children quickly found their quarters, passed them to Peter, and then returned to the group to help other friends find more quarters.  Searching the grass for the coins proved to be quite a task for the group at large.  We started with 60 quarters and ended up with 58!  One of the children theorized that perhaps the worms came up, snagged a couple of quarters, then took them down into the soil for their own purposes!  Regardless of what happened to the extra two quarters, it was great practice for all of the children to focus on small, relatively hidden objects, and then use their pincer grasp to pick up the tiny coins.  They also had opportunities to work together, mentor one another, and learn from one another.