News for week of March 3rd—

First, we want to thank you for the conferences. I hope you all know how much Leah and I care for your children and how much it has meant for us to be able to be a part of their lives this year. We've watched them mature and grow in so many ways and we feel truly blessed to be part of it. We're so excited to see what is to come through the end of the year and can't wait for the adventure to continue.

For a week with a day off, we sure were busy! We started the week celebrating Michael’s birthday with cupcakes they frosted themselves. We worked at centers this week, changing some and keeping some that the kids seemed to really like. We’re getting ready to add new centers for next week in preparation for Purim! Should be a week filled with fun!

We will dress in costume for Purim, Friday, March 21st, which is a half-day.

We finally finished our silly newsletter, the kids were very proud of their paper and enjoyed hearing the stories they made-up. They chose everything, from the layout of the paper to the collaboration of the stories. Their writing has come so far this year, we’re so proud of their growth. They seem to really enjoy writing these days, the light bulb has definitely turned on!

In math this week I combined journaling with graphing. We took our shoes off and put them in the middle of the carpet, then they got their journals and “noted” their observations about the shoes. We got so much writing from just letting them chart their thoughts. We then took their information and made a graph with the results. The next morning we taped-off the floor and graphed our shoes again to see if there were differences in the information from one day to the next.
We continue to work with money and are connecting the combinations of the coins with a puzzle I introduced this week. For example, they are starting to understand that a nickel is made of 5 pennies and a dime is 2 nickels. To continue our work on time we charted the time and weather throughout the day, it was particularly interesting Thursday and it changed from rain to snow and the temperature dropped about every 15 minutes--they loved it!!
Friday was lots of fun and we watched “American Legends”, which is from our generation. It’s narrated by James Earl Jones and shows little stories about American Legends; John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, Babe and his Blue Ox, Paul Bunyan, and Kasey Jones.

We’re going to start our Spring unit next week and all the things that go along with the season.