We are back from winter break and ready to learn!  This month, we begin a new unit about winter, snow and ice.  As an introduction this week (and thanks to last week’s snow!) we took a few walks around the Bremen St. Park and around the block to investigate how winter has changed our neighborhood.  We noticed snowy piles, icy sidewalks, and even our beloved playground was too frozen to play!

Indoors, we’ve added a wintry flair to our shelves as well as our projects.  We’ve added new penguin sorting animals and pattern challenge cards to go with them.  Winter projects join nicely with sensory exploration, and we did lots of that this week.  Ice cubes, for example, make interesting paint applicator if you freeze them with liquid water color.  Cotton balls may look snowy, but they are much warmer and can also be a fun way to add paint to a piece of paper.  Exploring new and different ways to apply paint to paper is an important exercise for children as they learn to think creatively about materials.

We’re also taking our new extra-long project time to rotate through specific small group projects.  Tugboats take turns working with Nora or Carla on math and literacy games.  We practice identifying numbers and counting out quantities of objects.  We look at letters and listen for the sounds they make in different words.  We search for patterns and try to make up our own.  It may be getting colder outside, but the fun is heating up in here!

What a busy few weeks we’ve had!  We’ve enjoyed the continuation of our Buildings, Construction and Architecture unit these past two weeks.  Projects led us to investigate the various internal structures that buildings need, like plumbing and solid construction.  We’ve looked to famous architects, including Antoni Gaudi, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Frank Lloyd Wright for inspiration in our own designs.  We also took a few short breaks to explore some festive holiday fun.  In celebration of Hanukkah, we made our own latkes and ate them dipped in applesauce!  For Christmas, we explored our sweet side in creating gingerbread houses.  And of course, we made time for the grown-ups we love and made top secret snowy holiday gifts for our families.  In addition to all of this excitement, we’ve welcomed in our new teacher, Nora, and prepared to say goodbye to our fabulous and wonderful Peter.  Phew!  Is anyone else feeling out of breath?!

As we turned the calendar to December, we began a new unit about Construction, Buildings, and Architecture!  I’m so excited about this unit, because it’s a collaboration between the teaching staff and a parent volunteer, so it exemplifies one of the amazing benefits of a co-op program.  Parents have a chance to influence their children’s education, while teachers have a unique opportunity to learn from our students’ parents in a very hands-on way.  It’s a win-win!  In this case, one of our parents is an architect and was very excited to share her career with the Tugboats.  She built a list of ideas that she thought would be important to share with the children, and with that, the staff began building our December curriculum.

This week, we focused on the different types of buildings in our neighborhoods:  houses, apartments, schools, libraries, police stations, grocery stores, restaurants, and more.  We took a close look at houses and found that they are composed of shapes we recognize, like squares, triangles, and rectangles.  Some of our students were given an opportunity to practice recognizing and recreating these shapes, while others practiced strengthening their fine motor skills by drawing their own houses and paying special attention to details.  We revisited a classic activity that we like to call City Build, in which we turn our entire classroom floor into a city!  The Tugboats were split into pairs and groups of three to focus on specific types of buildings that every city needs, and each was assigned a building material based upon his or her challenge levels.  We also enjoyed an activity inspired by literature.  After reading If I Built A House, by Chris Van Dusen, we imagined all sorts of fantastical rooms we would build if given the opportunity!  Finally, we used a literacy exploration to create our own imaginary city skyline.  Each child was given colorful letters to compose his or her own name.  Some children cut out their own letters, while others colored their letters with crayons or traced the letters written by adults.  When we stacked them up vertically and arranged them next to each other, it looked a lot like a row of city skyscrapers!

In addition to all of this construction fun, we were thrilled to welcome the newest member of our teaching team, Nora!  The Tugboats have enjoyed getting to know Nora and are fascinated to learn that she speaks both English and Spanish and that she teaches Spanish to students at another school.  We’re excited for all the wonderful things we’ll learn from Nora!

Finally, we took a break from our building unit this week to welcome some furry, fuzzy, feathery friends into the classroom: Barn Babies came for a visit!  Check out our album on our Facebook page (and Like us while you’re there!)  for some major cuteness overload.  Kerri and Vanessa brought puppies, kittens, bunnies, chickens, a piglet, and even a goat that wears a diaper for us to snuggle and enjoy!

We wrapped up our Characters We Love unit this week by focusing on imaginary characters that frequently make appearances in our play!  We talked about princesses, zombies, monsters, and unicorns this week  Each taking a day to review what we love (and what we’d like to leave to our imaginations!) and how we can be like these characters.

While we made our own prince or princess crowns, we talked about the letter P, the /p/ sound, and made a list of words that begin with the same sound.  We came up with quite a list!  On our monster day, we practiced collaborative art making by drawing three large monsters in which each child contributed a feature for the monster.  Zombie science day brought experiments combining baking soda and vinegar (so fizzy!) as well as water, oil, and Alka-Seltzer tablets (home-made lava lamps!)  We rounded out the week by imagining what would happen if unicorns had more than one horn, then practicing counting out the horns.  In addition to all of this excitement, we also took a local field trip to see a puppet show at Maverick Landing.  It’s been a busy week–check out some of the fun we’ve had!

This week’s Characters We Love: Pirates!  We adults know that pirates aren’t all seafaring fun.  The premise of taking what’s not yours in rather swashbuckling ways is not one we’d like to pass on to our students.  In their exposure, though, pirates are fun!  They dress interestingly, speak with hilarious phrases, and spend all their time with their best mateys.  We took advantage of this more positive side of pirates this week to encourage team work, creative thinking, problem solving, and hypothesizing.

Out on the playground and in the classroom, pretend games of Pirate were constant.  Each time, the children were great at establishing roles aboard their ships.  They shared the roles of steering the ship, cooking food, swabbing the deck, hunting for treasure, and even protecting the ship from sharks and sea monsters!  We also cultivated our pirate aesthetic (as well as our fine motor skills), making our own pirate parrots and popsicle-stick ships.

The treasure hunt took a turn indoors mid-week when we received a mysterious visit from Captain Swordbeard, who snuck into our classroom while we were outside and left a scavenger hunt for us to solve.  His screw of 20 sailors had mutinied against him and stolen his ship.  He needed us to find his treasure so he could buy his ship back!  We had to find numbers that were hidden all around the classroom.  The numbers were different colors and ranged from 0-20, and took all of our creative problem solving skills to find them!  Once we had found all of the numbers, we had to assemble them in order, which would unlock the secret hiding place of the treasure.  Peter told us to search in a dark, wet place where land-lubbers clean their eating tools. Inside the dishwasher (safely wrapped!) was the treasure!  The staff and I love reusing this activity because we can cater it to a variety of disciplines.  Finding numbers and letters is something we can always practice.  Their skills of searching and problem-solving improve while they continue to grow in the breadth of symbols and characters that they recognize and can use. The format is reliable enough for the children that they can focus less on the rules of the game and more on the specific task of numbers or letters.  And in the end, we all get a small special treat!

We ended the week with Pirate Sink or Float.  We filled a large clear bin with water and added a pirate ship to the bin for special effect.  We imagined that the pirates had a hefty cargo that they needed to unload!  Would their cargo sink or float?  For each object, we asked the children to hypothesize as to whether the objects would sink or float.  If they thought it would float, they had to sit by Carla.  If they thought it would sink, they had to sit by Peter.  We launched a ball of play dough, a domino, a unifix cube, a cotton ball, a rock, a bowl from dramatic play, a shrimp from dramatic play, an apple, a die, and an empty toilet paper tube into the deep blue sea and got some exciting results!  Both the cotton ball and the toiler paper tube floated at first, but later sank as they absorbed more and more water.  The toilet paper tube even started to fall apart!  We were also excited to see that the play dough ball began to disintegrate after about an hour or so.

We finished up our 6th and final week of yoga this week.  We’re going to miss our yoga classes with Megan and hope we can reprise them again!