Welcome back to school! We hope you all had a very relaxing spring break; we are looking forward to what is to come in the next few weeks of the school year. The week before our break, we introduced music and movement. All of the children love to play and listen to music, so we thought this would be an excellent time to introduce new instruments into our classroom. Some activities that the children loved doing were listening to different sounds and rhythms, creating their own music instruments such as kazoos and drums, and marching to a beat. We figured out as a class that there were eight beats per single verse in every song! The children loved counting up to eight and moving their bodies to the beat of the music. Music is a very creative way to learn, and surrounds us everyday. We wanted to expose the children to the different types of sounds that are all around us, and the children loved exploring the instruments!

This week we introduced Oviparous animals, which are animals that lay eggs. Some animals that we talked about were chickens, fish, ducks etc. Brooke and I loved hearing the children try to say, ‘Oviparous’ on their own while counting how many syllables the word actually had. Some things we did this week were, drawing animals that hatched out of eggs, filling empty egg containers with plastic eggs and creating paper ducks for our mural that will be building weekly outside the classroom J. We also saw it as a good opportunity to re-introduce letter recognition to our theme. The children used plastic cookie-cutter letters and letter ducks to identify upper and lower case letters. We felt that we should try to identify some words we know starting with the letters that were found. It was very impressive to see how many words some of the children knew!

As April comes to a close, we have a few upcoming events that we all want you to be apart of! The first event is the field trip to the Lake Erie Nature Center on April 22nd. Make sure that you send three dollars and your child’s field trip form to school! During the field trip, the children will get to explore the center and pet different kinds of animals that the center provides. It will be a fantastic experience, so please don’t miss out! The next event is Doughnuts With Dad, which is Wednesday April 28th and Thursday April 29th. We are inviting all Dad’s, Grandparents or special friends to come in and celebrate with us from 11:00-11:45! Next week we will start out gardening unit, which is perfect for our new spring weather! Some activities that the children will participate in are potting their own plants, creating daisy art, sponge painting with flowers and going on a nature walk! Please make sure to send your child in appropriate clothing, as we will be getting very messy in the next two weeks. Feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns! Happy Spring!