Winter weather was in full force, bringing lots of snow for snowmen, snowballs, shoveling, and sledding.  We are staying strong wading through the many inches of white flakes.  After our Wednesday snow day we really enjoyed all of the new snowfall.For Monday art we introduced the artist Hokusai, and his famous wood block print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.”  We used foam trays to “carve” out pictures using crayons, by making indentations in the foam.  We pressed our designs onto ink pads then printed them onto our papers.  Some of us layered our prints, as Hokusai did, to add detail and layers of color.We continued our study of fish with the introduction of sharks.  We learned that sharks do not have bones, but a flexible skeleton of cartilage.  Some sharks have 5 rows of teeth, and may go through thousands of teeth in a lifetime.  Unlike human teeth, shark teeth will be replaced repeatedly as they fall out.  We read that most sharks are carnivorous, but some eat only plankton.  We learned the Phytoplankton song, a favorite for the past several years, which teaches about an ocean food chain.We watched a short video of The Rainbow Fish story and discussed how lonely Rainbow fish was when he was unkind and treated the other fish like he was better than them because of his sparkly scales, and how he made friends and felt much happier when he shared his scales.  At the art table the children used their fingers to make fingerprint scales on their very own rainbow fish.

The Armstrong family sent in a fun story and activity for St. Patrick’s Day.  We read How to Catch a Leprechaun about a leprechaun that visits all the houses and causes mischief while avoiding all the tricky traps set by the children attempting to capture him.  Afterwards many children enjoyed using the little plastic pencil shaped tools to scrape the green off the shamrocks to create pictures.  Some children even worked on creating their very own tricky leprechaun traps.We played shark cage, a cooperative version of musical chairs.  We created a large tape rectangle on the floor, then played music while the children swam around the rectangle.  When the music stopped, they made sure that there was room inside the shark cage for everyone.  We gradually made the tape cage smaller and smaller as children left to wash hands, until only two students were left to fit into the tiny cage.A fourth birthday was celebrated on Thursday with delicious peanut butter cookies.  The birthday boy passed out the cookies while everyone finished washing hands and setting up snacks.  He showed us with his fingers that he is four years old, then proudly walked the globe around the candle sun while we named the seasons and counted the four years since his birth.  Happy birthday four-year old!We had some special visitors from Believe in Books. Andrea and AO brought the Cat in the Hat with them in honor or Dr. Seuss’ birthday. AO read the Dr. Seuss story What Was I Scared of? We then took turns hugging, high fiving, or waving to the Cat in the Hat before picking our very own Dr. Seuss book to take home.