We are the world...

We started out the week with another fantastic Star of the Week presentation.  The children will continue to have these presentations through the end of the semester and if we don't get to your child by the last week of this semester we will pick up where we left off in January when we come back from winter break.

This week we went all around the world and learned about all the various countries and holidays that are celebrated. We started out the week learning about Dia de los Muertos in Mexico and how it is celebrated and what cymbals are equated with this holiday.

We were able to hit the piñata and enjoy the sweet treats and stickers and items inside.  The children each took turns hitting the piñata three times and then the teachers took turns to break it and share all the goodies!  

For some of our pre-reading activities the children cut out letters on one page to match them onto another page and spell out some of the vocabulary words we discussed at circle time. 

Besides some of these vocabulary words, we learned about skeletons and how beautifully they are decorated for these holidays.  The children looked at lots of various images of the colors and decorations used and then were able to color and decorate their own skeleton heads in the room.

After heading to Mexico we learned about passports and had designed our own to take the rest of our trips for the day.  The children drew pictures of themselves and then we traveled around the room by pretending to sail across water and fly across the sky and drive on the highway to travel all over the world.  

In our travels this week we talked a lot about the variety of places people live and how different we all look from one another and yet we all live on this planet together and are all a piece of the puzzle.  

We gave each child a blank puzzle and the children took time to color all over the puzzle and then cut it into various pieces so they could bring their puzzled home and ask someone at home to try to put it back together.  Watch out parents, the children were very creative with their puzzles and they wanted to make them tricky to put back together! 

We worked on a bulletin board in our hallway as a class this week and after the children made hand prints on the giant globe they took a variety of paper people and added clothes and faces to them to also put on the bulletin board.  The teachers are going to be adding their hand prints to the background of the board which will appear on Instagram next week.

For some of our geography lessons this week we gave the children two maps of the world.  We counted the continents and then cut them out to have glue them onto the other map in the correct place to match up and learn which continents are near each other.

After enjoying our map lesson we learned about the various types of water there are in the world and that oceans are made up of salt water which is not something we can drink like the water in our sinks.  We did some science lessons that involved adding salt into jars of water to see what happens with toy objects we placed in the various jars to talk about buoyancy with salt water verses fresh water.

After manipulating the salt levels in water we looked at a variety of buildings from around the world like the Eiffel Tower and Pyramids and then built triangles for the pyramid shape and an outline for the Eiffel Town with masking tape and then painted all over the paper then removed the tape to 'magically' create the shape of the building they wanted.  These have been drying at school and will go home next week to enjoy.

 After we painted to make buildings we then worked on painting a glue solution onto balloons with tissue paper to make piñatas to remind them of the one we broke at school.  The children are welcome to use their piñatas at home or  use them as holiday decorations as well.

 After the visit to Mexico again, we went to Italy to learn about many things related to that country.  The children worked on some math with their pizza projects as they counted and wrote down the shapes they put on their pizza to represent various toppings.

Once we made our pizzas we then worked on building structures from around the world like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Egyptian Pyramids and the Great Wall of China.  We then built them with cups in teams to see who could build the largest structure, who could build the most structures, etc.

 We saw so many wonderful things from so many places in the world this week that after all of our travels we decided to take 'pictures' of everything we saw.  The children were given paper cameras and small circles of paper for the 'flash' where they drew images of the things they chose as their favorites from the week.

Before heading home on Friday we took one final trip to Africa.  While we were there we made necklaces which were called 'abuja' and added a variety of items to them to make them stand out.

What's Coming Up?

The request for spring semester tuition has gone out and will need to be paid by December 1st in order to be ready for the spring semester.  If any current parents have issues with this due date, please let me know.  

We do not have school next week, the week of Thanksgiving.  We will see everyone for Weather and Seasons week the week of November 27th.