We began a new topic of study this month about Characters We Love!  The staff have observed several characters and groups of characters emerge in our students conversations and play.  We are spending the month of November investigating those characters we love so much and why we love them!  First up: Superheroes!

Our crew is always into superheroes, and Halloween only intensified that love.  As a topic of study, they lend themselves very well to social learning.  Superheroes help us to look closely at traits we may want to emulate ourselves, and others we may want to leave for the pages of a comic book.  We began our week talking about what makes a superhero super.  The children told us about super powers, exciting uniforms, and awesome names.  Next, we spent most of the week becoming superheroes ourselves!  The Tugboats designed themselves as different heroes, painted their own capes to look like their fabric patterns, made masks to finish off the look, and built a super hero fort in which they could convene to solve problems!  Throughout the week, we made sure to frequently link the super qualities to the children themselves.  In drawing parallels between a superhero rescuing a citizen and a Tugboat helping a friend clean up a mess, we aim to highlight behaviors we like as well as cultivate positive self esteem.  Seeing their fabric patterns become capes helped reinforce that as well!  We had some non-superhero fun along the way, including mowing the “lawn” that has been growing in our sensory table, and our favorite Thursday activity: yoga!

In preparation for inclement weather related to Hurricane Sandy and an incoming early winter storm, HCS will be closed Monday, October 29. We hope to see you Tuesday!

It’s been another festive fall week here at HCS!  We kicked off our week with a grand clean-up of our plot at the Bremen St. Community Garden.  All year, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to learn in this beautiful space.  We’ve planted, tended, and harvested food that we grew ourselves–the amazingness of that never gets old!  Through the summer, we watched as the children progressed from reluctant and hesitant to enthusiastic veggie eaters at snack time.  All the while, they’ve developed an even stronger sense of care for our community.  They are avid care takers of not only the garden, but the park and neighborhood that surround it.  What a treat this has been!

We received a special visitor, Mailman Luke!  Mailman Luke is one of our local postal deliverers, and he recently contacted us about visiting the classroom. He told the children all about how he collects mail from the post office, drives around in his truck and delivers letters, cards, and packages to our neighbors.  The Tugboats asked him a variety of questions, then set about writing their own letters.  Peter demonstrated a few different names they could write to, including their parents, siblings, or characters we love.

This was also a preparation week for us as we gear up for Halloween!  On Wednesday, we made trick-or-treat bags to get ready for the big day.  We started with several packs of Halloween-themed stickers.  The kiddos worked to sort the stickers into baskets labeled by color.  Sorting objects by common features is a challenging pre-math skill, and one we’re always looking for new ways to practice for all of our students.  They practice color recognition, and some of them are beginning to read the names of colors printed on the basket labels.  Once we were organized, the decorating began!  On Friday, we made more party decorations, this time using our hands and feet!  The Tugboats dipped their feet in white paint and walked across black paper to make footprint ghosts, then dipped their hands in autumn-themed colors to make a wreath.  The feel of thick, gloppy paint on their hands and feet seems to be a universal favorite among preschoolers, and as long as we’ve got the resources to clean up after, we’re happy to oblige!

It’s been an adventurous week for us at Harbor City School!  We kicked off our week by making our final harvest from our garden.  The impending cold weather is not good news for our plants.  We were blown away by what an enormous harvest we gathered!  We hauled in potatoes, corn, green beans, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, greens, and a variety of herbs.  Some of these will be stored to dry and use later, others will be cooked, processed, or pickled for snacks very soon!  We were hoping to spend today clearing the rest of the plants from our plot, but the muddy ground foiled us.  Instead, we read a few books about Jack Frost and made our own frosty windows with contact paper and yarn.  We’ve hung them in our windows and hope that Jack Frost likes our work when he comes to visit us soon!

Another exciting adventure this week came in the form of a local field trip to the police station!  The Tugboats were so excited to visit the folks at Station 7 in East Boston.  We got to tour their facility and see where “the bad guys go,” as well as how they collect fingerprints.  The officers lets us investigate a squad car and a truck, and we even got to turn on the siren!  After all of that excitement, plus the long walk, we were quite hungry–and they surprised us with pizza!  The Tugboats are always excited to learn about jobs in our community, and we all feel very good knowing how hard our police force works to keep us safe.  This week was also our second week of yoga, and the Tugboats are really enjoying it!  Check out the photos below to see some of the poses we’ve learned!

And we’ve got the cool weather to prove it!  We’ve wrapped up our curriculum unit about cars and trucks and have moved on to a study of our most recent seasonal change.  When most of the Tugboats left school last Friday, the temperature was hovering somewhere around 70 degrees.  We returned on Tuesday to 50-degree weather and our heater needing to be turned on!  To start our week, we took a walk through our beloved Bremen St. Park and noticed the changes to the trees.  Where there were lush, green leaves just a few weeks ago, there are now crunchy, rustley leaves in a variety of colors.  We’ve talked about how the green part of the leaves makes food for the trees. When the air gets cooler, the trees take a little snooze through winter and live off of the food they already have.  Since they don’t need their leaves to make food during fall and winter, the trees “turn off” the green parts, causing them to change colors and fall off!  In preparation for this week’s projects, the kiddos collected a variety of fallen leaves.

Using the red, yellow, orange, and brown leaves they found, the Tugboats made leaf rubbings!  Each student placed a leaf underneath his or her piece of paper, then used the long side of a crayon to rub color across the page.  This highlighted the texture and shape of the leaves, allowing the students to study and notice how the veins looked different on each type of leaf.  We helped them dip their fingertips into green paint, then gently stamped them onto their crayon leaves to make little caterpillars!  Once our hands were clean, we sorted the rest of our leaves by color, shape, and size.  Later in the week, we observed those veiny structures and tried to imitate them ourselves.  Each student was given a large cut out in the shape of a leaf, and each leaf had been previously folded in half for them.  They used crayons to color the long line down the center of their leaves, then tried to emulate the wiggly lines on our collected leaves.  Next, we added paint to one side of the leaves, folded them in half, and unfolded them to discover a symmetrical masterpiece!

We took a break from our fall study on Thursday to welcome our newest guest educator, Megan!  Megan is the mother of one of our newest Tugboats and is a certified yoga instructor.  She’ll be joining us each Thursday morning between now and Thanksgiving to help us stretch our bodies, focus on our breathing, and practice controlling our energy.  In this week’s class, we imagined we were butterflies, elephants, and lions.  We took a journey in our minds to the beach, where we rode bicycles and stretched out on the warm sand.  We also learned new lyrics to “The Eensy Weensy Spider,” which tapped perfectly into our class’s gift for replacing the words in classic songs with new ones!  Stay tuned for more adventures with Thursday Yoga!