We were excited to welcome a new friend to Sunnybrook this week!  The children welcomed her and helped her learn the routines and structure of our classroom, and she has quickly become a happy member of our school family.

Hide and seek, snow fights, wrestling, truck driving and making piles of children were popular this week.  We were very interested in observing some Fairpoint workmen using an auger to drill a large hole and install a new telephone pole on Tuesday.  Friday students were thrilled to spend their recess time up on the big mountain of snow, sliding down on their bellies and bottoms and tromping around, then having running, hopping, skipping, walking and galloping races back and forth in the driveway.
Valentine’s Day Tuesday was an exciting day of distributing Valentine cards, bean bag toss, hopping in sacks, building heart chains, creating Valentine cards for friends and family, then joining together to enjoy all the tasty snacks and treats that everyone brought in.  We enjoyed cookies, clementines, fruit kabobs, cake, cupcakes, yogurt with strawberries, pumpkin muffins, grapes & pineapple, chex mix, and other yummy items.  Thank you to all of you who sent in snacks for our special day celebrating friendship and love!
We continued to learn about and work on our dramatic play Amazon rainforest with Susan.  The raflessia flowers were painted and assembled.  The children made a river and filled it with fish, crocodiles, bull and river sharks, and pink dolphins.  They added large leafy ferns and low growing plants.  They carved out the sides of the boats to make dugout canoes and made paddles to paddle down the river.   We are almost ready to go exploring!
Zeanny visited on Wednesday, not for Spanish, but to tell us about South and Central America.  We learned that the two primary languages spoken in South and Central America are Spanish and Portuguese and we practiced saying the names of the countries in Spanish.  She showed us a coloring book with pictures of animals, instruments, and a colorful bus used for transportation.  She shared many funny and interesting stories, including how capuchin monkeys kept her from gathering mangos from the mango tree in her backyard, why to never leave your backpack unguarded in the rainforest, what llamas do when they are displeased, and where to go skiing in the summer.  If they have not already, your children may enjoying sharing some of these funny stories with you.
We were full of energy on Thursday after a long night of snowfall, so we pulled out the parachute and played some fun parachute games.  The children raised the parachute way up then pulled it down as names were called and they ran under quickly to switch places, then everyone removed their slippers, mixed them all up, then raced to find them and put them back on.  We played our favorite game of “Great White Shark” but turned it into “Hungry Piranha” where the piranha swims under the parachute, grabs a foot and “eats” someone, who then becomes the next piranha.  The students were, as always, very careful to keep their feet still and carefully slide under to trade places, keeping everyone safe.
Susan brought several items from South America to share with the class.  She showed us a lovely dress woven from colorful threads, a blue alpaca or llama hair poncho from Peru, a carved wooden toucan and a macaw, and a clay-sculpture of an abuela or mama reading to a group of children, and explained how story telling is a cultural tradition of passing on histories and information.
For Friday science students continued to explore classes of animals with a study on fish.  We examined many fish figures, read About Fish by Cathryn & John Sill and Fishes by Brian Wildsmith, and did our animal class sort, determining if each animal was a mammal, reptile, bird, or fish.  We looked up fish of the Amazon, made fishing poles, then drew, colored, and cut out pink dolphins, bull sharks, river sharks, arapaima, peacock bass, and pirhanas, then climbed in the dugout canoes and went fishing!