MIS 3/4 Preschool

Happy Mother’s Day this weekend!!  Your children enjoyed perparing for the big day! 

We continued working in our community this week.  In fact, we hope you’ve seen the community we moved into the hall.  It features various houses and trees, a climbing gym, a spider on a leash, a squirrel, a library, a dog park, a beach, mountains, children’s museum, a mouse house, trails and road, a motorcylce jump, a tree house and, of course, people!  We look forward to exploring the Missoula community next Wednesday on our field trip.  Please participate in the Letter Carrier Food Drive this weekend and please send a non-perishable food item or toiletries with your child on Wednesday so we can deliver some things to the Food Bank in person!

We are practicing helping eachother in our classroom community and have enjoyed reading books like Stone Soup that involve people working together.  We also planted various seeds and have been excited by the results.  Most of us know something about plants.  They need dirt and water.  Some of us know they need light.  We know about leaves and flowers.  There are other parts of plants that are less familiar, and we had a great time talking about what those might be.  As a teacher, and a gardener, I had to resist just “teaching” them the names, but their creativity and curiousity demonstrate that learning is not about having all the answers!  I’ll share some of their investigation in a hall display next week.

Thanks to everyone who has volunteered to chaperone our field trips!  I have 6 parents (Andrew, Lara, Kim, Erin, Sigrid, and Suzanne) for our trip on the 16th amd 4 parents (Andrew, Courtney, Erin, and Kim) for our trip on the 23rd!!

The Blog is no longer working for photos.  So, I will display photos the old fashioned way, in the hall, for the remainder of the year.

Greetings padres,

We have been working in our candy shop (dulceria) and our toy store (jugeteria) all week as well as continuing our work as builders (constuctores.)  Young gardeners (jardineros) planted seeds and the young cooks(cocineros) tried their hands at making pupusas.  Thanks to Kim, aka mama de Lucia, for cooking with us!  Thanks to to Lara, mami de Isaac, for bringing us caterpillars!  Preschoolers are fascinated with their movements, growth and impending changes!!  Next week we will explore more insects as scientists (cientificos.)

We enjoyed two wonderful presentations today.  We had a personal visit from an award winning Colombian film maker who showed us his film about humpback whales.  The film was narrated in Spanish with English subtitles and great music, but the whales were the stars.  Your children were thrilled with every tail, fin and splash!   Later we watched the young dancers of the Rocky Mountain Ballet perform.  Loud tap shoes and beautiful wings  caught preschoolers’ attention.

Tonight is First Friday and, thanks to Itzel, your child artists are represented at Zoo City Brew.  They worked together to paint “Peace.”  This weekend also offers the Wild Walk Parade , a kick off for the wildlife film festival, and a lovely family event.  Enjoy!!

I am expereiencing technical challenges with the photos; please stand by!

I posted photos for this week and the week before Spring Break.  Enjoy!

We have jumped headlong into our unit on working together.  See the PYP page for details.  Students are assigned weekly jobs that allow them to show responsibility for their classroom community and learn to respect the roles of others.  In their new roles as jardineros, cocineros and artistos, they water plants, push in chairs after lunch and create paintings for our museo(museum.)  

Thank you for helping us continue our classroom post office.  We look forward to receiving letters from parents each Friday.  Our cartero (letter carrier) will deliver them Fridays or Mondays.

This unit provides lots of opportunities for parent involvement.  Let us know if you would like us to arrange a field trip to your work place or if you would like to visit the classroom to show us something related to your work (employment or community involvement.)  We will need chaperones for various field trips.  We may visit the PEAS farm, the Food Bank and a pizzeria as well as taking a couple of hikes. 

Earth Day is coming up.  We will celebrate together as a community on Saturday, May 21 at 10:oo.  We will be involved in cooperative games, inspiring art projects as well as some landscape maintenance on our playground.  Working together ties in nicely with our new unit.  I am looking for families willing to bring tools (rakes, shovels, crowbar, wheelbarrow or wagon . . .) and for a parent willing to lead a small (de)construction project.  (See Jenny for details!) 

If you have not yet signed up for parent teacher conferences, please see the sign-up sheets outside the classroom.  Next week I will e-mail those times to everyone as a reminder.  Conferences take place the week of April 23 and last for half an hour.  We look forward to the time to visit with you!!

We finished out movement and expression unit this week with a focus on sign language.  Sheryl Noethe, poet and neighbor of MIS, shared many preschool appropriate signs with us including dinosaur, dog, kitten, frog, children, dance, fall and the phrase “See you later, alligator!”  We made books to share with you at conferences in April.

In the photos, you will also see us making lively collage sculptures with Feather, watching skits about feelings in John’s kindergarten classroom, building bridges, being pizza, making “cake,” practicing sign, and on parade throughout the school and out the door . . . 

On Monday we will start our community unit with a walk up the hill.  We will also share our reviews of the UM International Food and Culture Festival.  Thanks for your support for both of these activities. 

Next week we will not have a blog update.  Jenny will be out on Friday.  Natalie will be here.  ENJOY!!

Wow!  It was a week of  shows.  First, we watched some excepts from a Cirque du Soliel performance, and heard comments like, “I can do that!” from the audience.  (You may want to keep them away from tight ropes and trapezes for a week or two!)  Then, each group provided the musical sound affects to accompany stories ready by Stacey.  Clearly, they had been practicing in music class!  They also participated in a full dress rehearsal (well, some of them had skirts on) of their Iguana dance with Itzel.  Finally, they were captivated by Itzel’s traditional Aztec dance representing a deer being chased by hunters.  The deer (venado) ran fast (rapidamente) until it was very tired and then ran slowly (lentamente) and finally it rested.  Then, it was up and running again.  Preschoolers joined in the dance without hesitation.  They also accompanied her on drums and maracas!

We continued exploring some early math through patterns and geometric shapes.  Jenny’s group played musical shapes at recess today.  We’ve all been playing shape bingo.   They are starting to find patterns everywhere.  Today, when Jenny made a pattern of shapes,  a student reponded, “I did 1-2-1-2 on my dad’s phone!” 

We used our knowledge of shapes and our developing counting skills to follow a recipe for pizza.  We partnered students from the two groups to read the popular story La Pizza.  They made enough pizza to open a pizzaria!  A wonderful conversation developed in the pizzaria today:  “I drew a circle.”  Said the pizza guy taking orders.  “Pepperoni!”  Another guy drew a circle, “Do you like my pizza?”  Later, “Who wants to draw me a picture?”  Then the game moved away from the table and back to the kitchen, “Pretend the pizza guy died and . . .”  (No actual pizza guys were harmed in the game.)

Look at two weeks worth of photos!!!  Also, please mark your calendars for Sunday, March 25th.  The UM International Festival will serve as a grand finale to our movement unit.  Plan to eat tastey food and see great performances!!

Here are the photos!

This week, we made crowns (coronas) to show what we know about patterns (patrones.)  We’ve been noticing patterns in our movement activities, our clothing and our toys.

We worked hard on cutting skills this week, an incredible feat in hand-eye cordination.  We know how to hold scissors, thumb up pointing away from our bodies, and hold the paper at the same time.  We practiced cutting on straight and curved lines until we had made . . . a boat (un bote) and . . .  the sea (el mar.)  Jenny’s group has been singing a song about a little boat.  See El barquito on the song page.

The class seems to have a lot experience taking care of babies.  In addition to discussing whether each one was a boy or a girl, preschoolers bathed, fed, dressed, covered and carried baby dolls around the classroom this week.

When they weren’t too busy nurturing babies, they dug dinosaur bones, built towers and went camping.  We heard a great conversation about planting imaginary seeds and are looking forward to spring with them!  Jenny’s group walked to the Cherry Street trailhead to Mt. Jumbo this morning.  We saw a lot of robins and checked the trail conditions.  It still has some ice but should be clear soon.  Let us know if you would like to join us for a morning walk next Friday at 9:00.  We will walk only if the weather is nice.

We are balanced.  Somos equilibrados.  We challenged our balance by carrying things across the balance beam.  We also weighed objects on a scale.   We tried eating a balanced meal in our picnic: apples, soy milk, chocolate and ice cream (helado). . .  In addition to balance we are working on patterns: apples, chocolate, apples, chocolate . . . (Hmm, I must be hungry!)

We worked on fine motor strength by tracing  letters with glue.  If you squeeze a glue bottle enough, it gives your hands a workout.  Then, to be balanced (for fun,) we added sand and glitter making textured letters we can trace with our fingers.

Thanks to la mama de Lucía,  for sharing video and treasures (tesoros) from their trip to Peru.  They went to the beach, so we did, too.  We floated boats (barcos) and made art with shells.

Itzel performed a bit of the dance of the iguana, with a video.  Notice the iguanas who came out of the audience to dance with her!

We also had middle school students perform skits related to Kelso’s choice.  See the fotos of preschoolers exploring light and shadow with the overhead projector and taking care of babies.  What a week!

We’ve been working on being an audience.  Preschoolers demonstrated how they  sit, watch, listen and show appreciation by clapping (aplaudir.) We were invited to a dance performance choreographed and performed by several middle school students.  The young critics gave the show rave reviews; they liked everything (todo,) especially the flips.

We used illustrations from the book La Bandita as models for figure drawing.  See the characters on display in the classroom.  

Listening to variations in music, we made marks fast and slow, loud and soft.   Preschoolers also explored different sounds made by tapping and banging on various objects.

A frog named Kelso appeared in our classroom.  Over the next couple weeks we will focus on distinguishing between small social problems and big problems.  Problems rarely feel small to preschoolers so I talk about them as problems they can handle.  When a small problem comes up, it’s time to think, make a choice and communicate.  Big problems are the ones they take to parents and teachers.  Big problems are ones that scare us or seem dangerous.  We can ask for help with small problems if making choices does not work.  Next week we’ll look at some of those choices.

I would love to get feedback on the blog. Could everyone send a short comment?  I am curious; who reads it?  Do you ever view it with your child?   Would you prefer just photos?  Thank you!  Have a lovely weekend.

We learned the names of shapes: squares, rectangles, circles and triangles (cuadrados, rectangulos, ciculos y triangulos.)  We made predictions of whether objects would float or sink (flotar o hundirse.)  We worked at building bridges (puentes) which is a bit more advanced than building a fence.  We had small visitors and big visitors, and one visitor who took us by surprise by dancing the Cumbia during our morning play time.  She left us with smiles on our faces.  “Who was that?”  “That was funny.  I don’t know who was in that.”  “I think her a princess.”  “I dressed up as Spiderman.”  “Her didn’t have no shoes on. . . “  “A weird guy cam in with a weird dress and. . . “  “It was Adriana!”  “It was a pretty costume, and it looked like a dress.  She had a mask.”  ”We saw a mask and a white dress and her danced in our class and her went away.