St. Patrick's Day Shenanigans!

We're having a blast this week looking for Leprechauns!  Everyday we're adding green footprints around the classroom and today we're adding them in the cafeteria and the gym.  So far we haven't spotted any.....at least not yet!  We're painting our rainbows and pots of gold today and tomorrow we're making green hats to wear as we look for our little friends!  On Thursday we'll make green pudding, better known as pistachio pudding, for snack!  We have a recipe that will allow each child to make their own pudding and they love cooking.

Musical Guests This Week

We've had some musical guests this week and the children are loving it!  So far we've enjoyed the saxophone, the flute, and the trumpet.  Jen, one of our speech therapists, brought in her saxophone and the children were able to play notes on it as she blew through the reed.  Karla brought in her flute and she had an extra flute that the children were able to try and blow through. That was a lot of fun as the children tried to get out at least a sound and several of them were able to and they all clapped for each other! Today, my daughter, Grace, came in and played her trumpet.  The children played the three valves to try and get different sounds as Grace blew the air through the trumpet. She showed them a mute and they heard the different sound the trumpet makes with that attached. 

We had an opportunity to play with different types of cooked noodles in the sensory table.  The children liked playing with it as an addition to their pizza shop.  We started out using our fingers and then we added pasta spoons and tongs to 'serve up' spaghetti dishes! 

Dates to Remember:

Monday, March 14-No School due to a training day for staff.

Thursday, March 24-Swimming at the YMCA.

Food, Food, and More Food

This has been a fun week with all the food that we've been cooking!  We started out the week making Puppy Chow.  That wasn't from one of the countries that we studied but it was on the back of the cereal that we ate at snack and it suggested by several students that we make it so we did and it was delicious.  We did look at food from Italy and we chose to make pizzas today.  We each made our own with an English muffin.  Then we added pizza sauce, mini pepperonis, and shredded mozzarella cheese.  We made them about mid-morning and played for a few minutes while they baked and they were a hit to make and a hit to eat!  We have wonderful cooks in our classroom!

We also made letters and numbers in cool whip with graham cracker sticks this week that involved a little eating and little creating!  We talked about the letters with straight versus curved lines.  We practiced our letter making skills while we used the graham crackers to make the lines or to write in the cool whip.  It was great fun and delicious too.

We watched our last segments of the instruments of the orchestra this week.  We finished with the string section and the percussion section.  We also played in our flutophone band and learned of different ways to make sounds come out of our instruments.  We each had a chance to play a solo in front of our friends and then take a bow as their friends clapped for them!