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!