What a welcome sight the sun was today after 2 days of rain!  While we do try to get the Tugboats outside, even for a short walk, when the weather is less nice, the cold is making that more and more difficult.  We were all eager to get to the playground this morning, imagining that surely the swings have missed us in our absence.  We all bundled up and headed to the playground to discover something incredible on the slides:  ice!  While the air temperature was tolerable in our coats and hats, the parts of the playground that remain shaded from sunlight still had bits of ice on them from last night’s cold!  Peter carefully removed a few sheets of ice from the climbing structures and the children cautiously examined it.  They noticed that it looked shiny and felt wet, just like a puddle, but Peter certainly wouldn’t be able to pick up a puddle!  They also observed how it cracked when Peter applied pressure.  Once it was broken into smaller-than-feet-sized pieces, we let them jump up and down on the ice, effectively turning it into slush.

Today’s trip to the playground was an excellent example of the unplanned learning that is so vital to an emergent curriculum.  We were able to take advantage of circumstances that we couldn’t have planned for, like ice remaining on the playground at 10:30, and couple that with the natural curiosity and interest of our students to create an exciting teachable moment!

The parent teachers have really been pulling out all the stops this month and today’s was no exception: Isa’s mom, Liz!  Isa and Liz came to school today prepared to thoroughly celebrate the letter C.  They donated carrots for snack and brought a special science project that involves celery, carrots, and colored water!

During group project, Liz used food coloring to tint a few cups of water.  For the first experiment, she sliced a piece of celery up the middle to form two legs at the bottom, then placed each leg into a cup with a different color of water.  She also placed several young stalks of celery into individual cups with other colors of water.  If all goes according to plan, the water will travel up the stalks and change the color of the celery!  We are hoping to see the first stalk, which uses two different colors, demonstrate how colors mix to form other colors.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens!

Isa’s grandmother, Oma, and her Aunt Petra are visiting from Germany, and they paid a special visit to Circle Time and taught us the days of the week in German.  This is another example of how the co-op component helps integrate children’s home experiences into the classroom.  German is a special part of Isa’s family life and now she gets to share it with us!

Despite the excitement over Mr. Peter’s birthday (HURRAY!), it has been a pretty low-key Tuesday here at Harbor City School.  We enjoyed having Antonella’s mom, Christina (another C-name for C-week!) in the classroom with us.  Christina dives right into dramatic play, which is a favorite of the kids’.  Everyone was so excited to cook up some breakfast for her!  We also discovered her knack for making up songs, as each child requested a special song from her about how they put on their coats.  What a treat!

Today’s post’s picture comes from one of our afternoon adventures, which seldom get documented here on the blog.  First of all, I write the blog during nap time and before the afternoon adventures have really begun.  Secondly, our afternoons are often more laid-back than our mornings because a few of our friends go home at lunch time.  Yesterday, we took advantage of our low numbers to set up a small obstacle course in the open, grassy space at the Bremen St. Park.  We used the long tunnel to climb through (or pretend to be a worm!), as well as the colorful cones to practice running in Figure 8s.

Although we are eager and excited to welcome new friends to our classroom community, Peter and I really cherish these low-ratio times during our start-up phase.  We’re had so many opportunities to spend quality one-on-one time with each of our Tugboats and it’s been a real pleasure getting to know them each so well.

I think it’s understandable that I’m a little biased about our letter of the week: C is for Carissa! It is also for a variety of other words we will see this week, including crackers, cupcakes, and carved pumpkins!

C can be a very challenging letter in the English language.  The letter B was difficult to write, but easy to spot and sound out in words.  This morning, we all noticed that C is easier to write than B, but much trickier to pick out of words.  C and K both make the “kh” sound, so when they hear that phoneme, it can be difficult to decide which letter is making the sound.  Additionally, C also makes the “ss” sound and the “ch” sound when paired with the letter H.  There are so many phonemes to keep up with!  As Peter read Little Cloud by Eric Carle, the children quickly and eager chimed in as they heard and saw the letter C in the text.

I’m so impressed with how the Tugboats have embraced our alphabet curriculum.  Each week, the children arrive eager and excited to share the letters and words they collected over the weekend.  They’ve also begun to look for words that begin with our letter of the week all on their own.  At lunch today, as I was enjoying a burrito, one of the children noticed, “Hey!  Burrito starts with the letter B!  Like last week!”  Another child commented, “Yeah!  It does!  And B is different from C.  This week is C.”  Not only are they excited about the working we’re currently doing, but they’re recalling things we’ve already explored and integrating the new information with the old.  It’s so exciting to see they way their thoughts process!

In other news, we welcomed our first Dad parent helper today: Natalia’s dad, Kevin!  The children were absolutely overjoyed to have yet another male adult in the classroom.  Everyone was excited to build with Kevin, to listen to him read stories, and have him push them on the swings.  He’s become quite the super start parent!  We had such a wonderful time getting to know Natalia better through her father.  We can’t wait to get to know more families as well!

Happy Friday!

It was certainly a low-key day today at Harbor City School: just 5 kids!  Teresa, Aviva’s mom, joined us as our parent teacher today and it was such a treat!  During Free Play, the children discovered what a wonderful imagination Teresa has and loved inviting her into their dramatic play.  She ordered a burbleberry pie that was all the rage!

During project time, Teresa taught us some yoga.  The children loved it!  We learned many different poses and made our bodies into the shapes of different animals, like a cow or a cat.  After practicing some poses, Teresa invited the kids to develop their own poses, which was a huge hit!  We saw a variety of poses emerge, including a flower, an inchworm, a whale, and even a firetruck!