The garden bed has been a great source of wonder this week.  Fingers, shovels and diggers were busy every day pulling out the few remaining plants and searching through the dirt for worms.  Word tag was once again a popular game.  The tagger slowly stretches a word out into the individual sounds and the decoders shout out which word they heard then run run run as fast as they can.
During Monday art the students were introduced to Wassily Kandinsky, who used many shapes in his paintings.  One of his most famous pieces is Squares with Concentric Circles, which inspired our creativity for the week.  The children used various sized jars, cups, bowls, and caps to print black circles all over their papers.  When the circles dried they used different colors to paint them in or to create their own colorful abstract art. We welcomed two new students to Sunnybrook on Tuesday morning.  We enjoyed playing together and getting to know them, and are looking forward to the rest of the year together. We discussed when it is important to come get a teacher for help, and when and how to give friendly reminders.  The children worked together to make a list of classroom rules and noticed that we are doing quite well with following most of them.  We identified a couple that we are going to actively work on, particularly putting away our work before moving on. We also continued to discuss how we are the same and how we are different. How we all have bones and muscles and thoughts and feelings, but we have different likes and dislikes. We read the story Elmer by David McKee about an elephant who is afraid that he is only loved because of his unique patchwork coloring, but discovers that he is loved for who he is and not how he looks. The children made their own Elmer pictures in honor of Elmer’s uniqueness. As it is Stone Soup month at Sunnybrook, we read two versions of the story, Stone Soup by Marcia Brown and Some Friends to Feed by Pete Seeger. Friday we had a quiet day.  The children spent the morning working then went outside early as it looked like rain was imminent.  Luckily it held off and we had a lot of fun playing baseball, chase, make believe, and digging for more worms in the garden.  In the afternoon we decided to take a walk into town to visit the Polish Princess for a chocolate chip cookie, then spent some time at the library putting on puppet shows, playing with Duplos, reading stories, and riding in the school bus, fire truck, and ambulance.