Pirates on the Deep Blue Sea!

Ahoy There Matey (I mean...Mom!),

We scurvy dogs had a jolly good time playing as Pirates this week as we learned about the Ocean.

Our story for Pirate Day was How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long & David Shannon. It's a great story about Jeremy Jacob, a kid who became a pirate when they showed up at the beach he was playing on one day and needed his super digging skills to bury their treasure.

We wanted to be pirates too, so we made ourselves a costume!

We created a hook for our hand, only we used a tongue depressor inside the foil as a sturdier handle to hold.

Also, a kid can't be a true Pirate without a hat and a patch (foam and ribbon) to wear and a spyglass to search the blue horizon for other ships & islands to pillage!

By the time we'd created everything and learned some "pirate talk"- like 'land lubber', 'Yo Ho Ho', 'Shiver me Timbers' and 'Jolly Roger'- we were ready to get into true character and search for some buried Treasure in the sand box. Ms. Marianne had some sifting and digging tools out for us to use for uncovering our ABC's and "gold doubloons". We found each letter and told Ms. Marianne what its name and sound were, and we counted 40 pieces of gold that we collected in a treasure chest for safe keeping. It was awesome!

 Next, we discovered what is under the ocean! We read Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae and met sneaky side-walking crabs, beautiful (but vain!) Angel fish and bumming-around barnacles. It's a fun rhyming story that introduces kids to many animals in the ocean with facts and silly ways to remember them.

We used stickers to create our own ocean animal scenes- our own Commotion in the Ocean! (yay for practicing fine motor skills and creative play!) and Ms. Marianne was so tickled to listen to us as we made shark stickers chase down dolphins, made our octopus hide behind some "rocks", and had our hermit crabs walking along the floor of our oceans. We are a group with a flair for the dramatic, that's for sure! But this also showed that we've been internalizing the discussions we've had about the ocean life- which makes Ms. Marianne glad.


 For some fishy math, we decomposed our teen numbers by creating "schools of fish"- one group of ten plus "some more". Each time we'd have some more fish swim into the ones place section of our ocean, we'd count them and then figure out which teen number of fish we now had. Then we'd find that number on our cards and place it in our ocean and then count ALL the fish and check to see if our answer matched the card's number. We're getting good at our teens and understanding place value basics!

We used this website to learn facts about ocean animals and to have some fun creating a fish as a group. Every fish we created looked ready to kiss someone, with its huge red lips! We thought that was hilarious, which is probably why we picked the same mouth each time. :) Then, we made our own starfish by coloring, cutting out and then texturizing with tiny pasta pieces a picture of one. They're just as beautiful as some of the pictures of starfishes that we found in our picture exploration on the computer, but these we get to keep!



Our final day this week was all about sharks! We read this neat book called Sharks by Catriona Clarke and made a sharp toothed shark that munched fish crackers during our math time as we practiced counting and adding / subtracting sets. Then we got to be sharks and munch some fish crackers of our own!

We watched this shark video about Great White sharks, this one about whale sharks, and this one about hammerhead sharks. Even though there are 400+ species of sharks, far too many to study in our short class time, we were able to discover many facts about some of the different shark species today like: 1- sharks in general can't swim backwards, like other fish can!; 2- hammerhead sharks pin down their prey (usually rays) with the side of their heads, then bite the ray's wing and when the ray can't swim away, the shark takes his time eating him!; 3- most sharks have lots of rows of teeth and when a shark loses a tooth, or it becomes unusable, another one moves forward from another row to take it's place. Sharks are amazing fish!

Next week will be our last week of preschool- can you believe it?! After speaking with most of the parents, it seems that Thursday, May 22nd will be the best day for our Preschool Celebration. We've been working hard on a small presentation about all the things we've explored and learned about this year and we'd love to invite you to come to our preschool classroom that day from 11:30-12:30 for our performance, a chance to look through our portfolios and see how we've grown in our time together and also to enjoy some light snacks. If you'd like to bring a little something to share, please feel free!

One last thing- some of us have been asking for an opportunity to do a "Show and Tell" day. Tuesday of next week would be a perfect day for that! Please help me to choose something special to share with my classmates. I need to be prepared to talk a little about it and answer questions too. Whatever I bring will be returned home that same day. :)

See you then!


Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne

Schnepf Farms

Hi Mom,
This week we finished our Down on the Farm unit. We learned about different kinds of crops- animal related crops like milk & meat from cows and wool from sheep and orchard crops like apples and peaches (which we got to pick for ourselves off the trees at Schnepf Farms later this week) and field crops, like vegetables (which we also got to pick from the fields at the Farm!) After discussing the different tools that farmers use to plow, sow and harvest fields, we created a farm field scene as a class and pretended to "harvest" our crops one by one.

For writing practice, we completed the sentence "If I were a farmer, I'd grow...". Our work on this project really made Ms. Marianne happy! It shows that we're really putting everything together that we've learned about letters, the sounds they make and the words they're used to create. We decided which crop we'd grow and then worked with Ms. Marianne to sound out that word. Then, all by myself, I figured out which letter each sound made and wrote that letter on my paper! It was so awesome!! As farmers, we want to grow


'apls'



'scwash' (I had a little help on the -sh part!)



'strobires'

'letus'

Didn't we do GREAT?!?

Once we had finished our writing, we put all our knowledge of the parts and functions of a farm into practice and created a farm scene of our own using stickers and construction paper. We made brown mud pits for our pigs, blue ponds for our ducks, green pastures for our sheep & cows and some of us even put blue clouds and a yellow sun in the sky.


 For math, we continued working on recognizing and understanding our single and teen numbers, and extended our skills a little more by looking for numbers that Ms. Marianne called out in the grocery ads. There are SO many numbers in the pages of those newsprint ads... it was tricky for us to find the one she wanted. We worked together sometimes and on our own if we felt like we could do it all by ourselves. But we found every number she called out!



riding the slide into the goat pen

On Thursday of this week, we all met at Schnepf Farms to celebrate our learning! We saw most of the animals we had learned about and practiced using the correct name for each (i.e. boar / sow / piglet) and we had a blast in the petting zoo seeing them up close and in person. Who knew that goats were that friendly (and that the kids are that cute!) and that pigs smelled THAT yucky?? pee-yoo!

plugging our noses near the pigs

We had some great discussion questions during our field trip like "Why aren't the pigs pink?" (they were dark brown, but not because they were dirty!) and we learned a lot about the animals by being near them.

We also were privileged to pick vegetables (like the squash one of us wanted to grow!) from the fields the farmer had planted just for visitors to harvest from. It was such a neat experience to be able to pluck the sun ripened zucchini, the juicy tomatoes, the (really, really REALLY stuck) carrots and more from the warm, wet dirt and take them home to wash and eat! I can't wait to make a salad and to steam some of our zucchini!

One of the ladies who worked at the farm taught us how to pick the peaches that were just right from the trees in the orchards on the farm. She told us to get right up close to them and sniff. If they smelled like a peach, they were ready to pick and take home! This really helped us when we got to the orchards and were ready to pick our crop... and she was right- the peaches that smelled like peaches really did taste perfect. Ms. Marianne even chopped some up and put them over vanilla ice cream for a tasty treat later on... yuuuuummmm!

While we were on the farm, we also got to

ride the train

and the carousel...

Chase the roaming roosters

conquer hay bale mountains

excavate...something!

let our true personalities shine!

be ourselves... together. hahaha!

clean up...and play, of course!

Ride the "Cool" Bus (umm, yeah! We're in Ms. Marianne's class after all...)

see how hard it is to traverse planted fields!! Those furrows are tough for little (and even long!) legs!

appreciate how vegetables grow (and sometimes don't want to come out!)

find our inner farmer

remember how COOL farms are- and how much we just LOVE vegetables

take a much needed respite from the sun (it was WARM!)

and- most importantly- build friendships!



 Thanks for a fabulous week! It was a blast. :)

Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne