We are back in school and the first month went by so fast! With full enrollment, we were busy getting to know the new families and FALLing into our school routines.

After the new students settled in during their first week, the children worked on drawing their self-portraits and writing their name. These are used for the children’s’ birthday calendar in the classroom. Here are a few examples of the little artists:

 

The kids turned into scientists and discovered what floats or sinks and why.  They also made boats with loose parts like popsicle sticks, paper, thread, glue, sticky tape, toothpicks, and other materials. This was such a fun project!

We received a donation of flowers from a family’s wedding. How wonderful! Immediately we could turn this into a flower anatomy science project. Words that we used were: scientist, investigate, dissect, flower arrange, petal, stamen, pistil, stem, hollow, journal, still life, self-portrait, frame, fossil, magma, dormant. The children chose their flowers, cut the stem to a length that would fit the vase and arranged them in the little glass vase. A beautiful gift that the children could bring home to give their parents.

 

The children organized their cubbies and part of that is their art box; each child has their own that gets filled with arts and crafts over the year. But first, they transform the boring looking shoe boxes into their very own exquisite art boxes.

 

We also learned each others’ and the family members names. We started practicing giving each other messages, an important part of our social-emotional studies.

In the first weeks, we heard this question often during circle time: “What is your superpower to help the world?”

Our children love math! We were recognizing numbers and how they are used – calendars, temperature, counting, time, age, weight, height, etc.

We also read lots of books about animals, in particular, the ones we may see in our Southern Maine community and their habits… including tracks, eating preference, where they live, habits and scat of course. This prepared us especially for the upcoming field trip to Kettle Cove beach.

Lots of chalk, dress up, fairy houses and games. The children loved the warm September weather and we spent as much time outside as we could.