Encouraging Early Literacy at Home

As parents and teachers we are always mindful of providing opportunities for our children/students to exploring literacy.  A couple of fun play based approaches you can do at home to encourage early literacy skills include:

* Reading to your child daily

* Write your child a note in their snack- perhaps they will write you a note back!

* Provide your child the opportunity to express themselves such as through "reading" you a story, "writing" you a story, writing in a home journal or drawing you a picture.

* Have your child write the grocery list

* Have your child cross off the grocery items when you are shopping

* Ask your child to identify the price of different foods around Tamimi's

* Have a basket with writing tools in it- paper, pencils, crayons, etc.

These children are really starting to become writers! It would be great for them to show you all the things they can do at home as well!

Observational Painting

Today we were doing more observational painting.  This is something that you can do at home really easily.  Give your child a paintbrush/crayons/markers/pencils and ask them to pick an object they would like to draw.  Have them look at it, and draw/paint what they see.  They really enjoy it.  It is a good hand-eye coordination task, as well as creative and artistic one. 

Second Visit to K3

Today we went to visit our buddy class in K3 again.  This time we stayed in their two rooms.  Most of the classes in K3 have two classrooms due to the size of them.  We had lots of fun engaging in different activities in K3- from writing, playing games, exploring their animal kingdom, painting and making puzzles!

Green Finger Project

As part of our Earth Day celebrations we participated in the Green Finger Project!
Please see the video below.

Matching our skin color

After we had painted our clothes on our bodies, we needed to add our faces, arms and legs.  We wanted to be as accurate as we could with our skin tones, so we did a paint experiment.  We have 8 different skin tone colored paints.  We put a dot of each color on each child's arm and voted on which color we thought matched their skin color.  

After, the children went and used the appropriate skin color. We talked about which skin color was the most common, and according to the paint names, it is called "toast".

Earth Day!

Today we celebrated Earth Day!  Some of the children brought in their creations from the palm fronds.  If you haven't done this yet you are welcome to bring them in at any time.  There is a big display set up in the front entrance of our school.  It is amazing all the different things that can be made from palm fronds!

One of the activities for Earth Day was to assign an Earth Carer.  Amaya is an active Earth Carer. She loves to recycle every day and can explain why. Thank you Amaya!

Today we wrote a promise to our Earth.  We came up with the following (and the children wrote them):

1. To recycle

2. To throw our trash in the garbage

3. To put trash we find in the garbage

We have a very responsible class!

Transitioning to K3

Today we had our first visit to Mr. Josh's class as a part of our K3 transition.  To clarify, this doesn't mean that your child will be in Mr. Josh's class, it is just that we have partnered to do transition activities together.  

Each child in our class was partnered with a child in Mr. Josh's class. They were responsible for showing us around the outdoor area in K3. 

When we had swimming in 2014 we saw the K3 chicks and bunny when they were little. Today we got to see how they have changed and grown. 

We were excited to see the big learning garden in K3. 

Our class LOVES bikes.  Today we got to ride on the bikes around K3.  There were different sizes as well as two seater bikes. 

The children really enjoyed their first visit to K3.  We will do several more of these over the next few weeks of school. Stay tuned for more visits!

Looking at the outside of our bodies

We have been exploring and inquiring into what are healthy habits and healthy goals, but wanted to dig a little deeper and see why this is important. We talked about how what we do to the outside of our bodies (like exercise) affects our insides, and what we put inside our bodies (food) affects the outside of our bodies (growing).

We started out by tracing out bodies and making two copies.  One is going to be the outside of our bodies, and the other will be the inside, such as some of our important organs and bones! Stay tuned for more development on this process.