It's a brand new year- 2014- and we've started it on our best foot forward. We learned a new vocabulary word- resolution- when we made our "New Year, New Me" art project this week. We discussed why people make resolutions and what we wanted to do better this year. Then we "wrote" these things by dictating them to Ms. Marianne so she could write them for us on the self-portrait we made of ourselves celebrating the new year. 
Speaking of celebrating, we had a friend who had a birthday over Winter Break and we celebrated as a class with yummy cupcakes on Tuesday. Happy Birthday buddy!
Our letter of the week is Jj for January and jelly beans! We created our Letter of the Week Wall with all kinds of pictures and words like jar, juice, jump, jeans, Jack o' Lantern and jam. We read a book about a boy who helps his quirky aunts make plum jam on their farm in Minnesota. We learned a lesson about stealing during this reading too because the boy in the story took the plums for their jam from the neighboring farmer's tree and had to make it right by apologizing and giving the farmer some of the jam that they made. 
This story time led to a fun science experiment on Wednesday where we did a taste test to determine our favorite jams both individually and as a class. We tried strawberry (made by Ms. Marianne!), red plum, orange marmalade and grape flavors. Our feelings about each flavor were recorded on a data sheet and then we decided at the end, based on our results, what our individual favorite was and what our overall favorite was. Almost all of us liked grape jam the best! 
Now that we've learned nearly ALL of our alphabet letters, we're beginning to sound out words in preschool! We're learning about word families (-am, -it, -ig, etc) so that we understand that we can get a whole new word just by changing the first letter! This week we studied the -am word family. We used manipulative letters to break apart, sound out and blend -am words back together as a group. We each got to go up to Ms. Marianne's easel and sound out a word on our own and then we each had one on our desk that we go to work out and present (Ms. Marianne helped in this). It was so neat to see the looks on everyone's faces when they realized what word they'd just sounded out. To hear /j/-/a/-/m/ blended together faster and faster until the child could hear the word 'jam' and then see their "ah hah!" looks made Ms. Marianne's heart smile. :) Each week we'll be working on a different word family on Wednesday during the reading group time. We can practice at home too! It's alright to sound out nonsense words too. We did that in class this week with words like fam, nam and vam. We loved to pause and think about whether or not the word is real or nonsense and then, if it was a real word, have Ms. Marianne write it on the list we created that will hang in our classroom. Learning to distinguish real and nonsense words makes me a better reader because if I can realize that what I just said was wrong, or a nonsense word, I can go back and try again to sound out the correct word. Our Music Moments this week were from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite and included pieces such as Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Chinese Dance, and our very favorite this week, the Russian Dance. We really enjoyed dancing around and using the musical instruments to keep a steady beat (or just play along with!) these short pieces. Music is such an important part of life! We'll continue to experience it in preschool each week.
Our big math project this week was Jelly Bean Graphing. We each got a big handful of jelly beans, which we sorted by color. Then we worked together to color the key of our jelly bean graph so that we knew where to record each color's quantity. This gave us the chance to practice recognizing our color words. Once our key along the bottom of our page was colored, we counted the quantity of each color bean and recorded it by coloring one square in that color's column for each bean we had on our table. Once we were done coloring our graphs, we came to the Circle to share our results and discuss what we discovered. One friend had TEN yellow jelly beans- the most out of everyone in the class! Two friends had the same number of orange jelly beans. Another friend had four jelly bean colors that had the same number of beans on her desk! :) Lots of math fun taking place here. Not to mention we got to take our jelly beans home afterward to enjoy when Mom said! 
Also, next Monday, January 20th, is Civil Rights Day. On Tuesday, we'll be discussing Martin Luther King and his "I Have a Dream" speech. Please take a moment and chat with me and help me brainstorm what I would like to see change for the better in our world, as we'll be writing it down as a part of a diversity and peace art project we'll be creating the week of January 21-23.
It's going to be a fantastic week!
Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne
