We would like to thank you for helping your child with their valentines! We realized it was a lot of valentine’s for some of you to do, but we wanted to ensure no one was left out. With your help, everything went smoothly! Just think of all the one to one correspondence practice the children experienced! We also appreciate all the goodies and donations for Valentine’s Day week!

After our unit on winter, it was obvious that the children were very interested in what animals do in the winter. To extend this theme, we did an author study on Jan Brett. We read some of her books set in the winter. We discussed what an author and an illustrator does and how Jan Brett goes to different places to study the animals that she puts in her stories. The children really seemed to enjoy looking for clues of what might happen next in the borders of her illustrations. To end our unit we received a package in the mail from Jan Brett! The children looked at it everyday last week! I am sure we will be reading more of her stories through out the rest of the school year. To continue learning about animals our next unit of study will be: Polar Animals.

It is our goal in our classroom to inspire creative thinkers. As with so many things in early childhood, artwork is a process. It is all about the exploration, the engagement, the experience. There are no right or wrong answers. It is the child, his/her creativity and the medium. It is a learning process with immediate feedback. It is quite possibly messy, but engaging, interesting and even sometimes challenging. As a teacher we know we are doing a great job of providing good open-ended art activities to the children when a child chooses to do the project over again and again! We feel privileged to watch as your child progress through the stages and challenges and we see their artwork evolve!