Upstairs Neighborhood
11/10/22
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Hello Neighborhood Families
Hello Neighborhood Families
After an unusually warm streak of weather, it’s nice to see the kids with big smiles, rosy cheeks and looking cozy thanks to their layers, hats and knit gloves. Every day is full and we are all so busy the day just flies by. Every day we teachers can’t believe it’s time to clean up and share our roses, thorns, and buds before dismissal. Time really flies when you are having fun!
Storytelling: Randolph Made Books
Storytelling: Randolph Made Books
The Kittens and Robins are deep into making stories and books of their own. They were inspired by two different decks of story cards. One deck has illustrations that feature repeating characters in various settings. The other deck of story cards has an adjective and character that you put together with a card that has an action and adverb. The kids have been creating their own deck of story cards now and are coming up with such funny descriptive words. They put a couple cards together and write a quick story.
Michael, our music teacher, was galvanized by Evan Pritchard’s stories and asked the children to use forest animals as central characters for movement, sound and plot created by the Kittens and the Robins. These two stories have been told and illustrated by all the children in the Neighborhood and will shortly be made into “Randolph Made” story books for the school library.
Reading and Writing are Fun
Reading and Writing are Fun
We’ve started the new phonics and handwriting programs and the kids have dubbed it FUNics. In addition to learning sounds and forming letters at various skill levels, this work has crossed over into all their writing and reading strategies. The Neighborhood kiddos have Shared Reading time every Friday with the Funghi Friends, and it is wonderful to overhear the older children sound out words, pore over the illustrations and read to the younger kiddos. Children have lots of opportunity to practice letter recognition and corresponding sounds by putting together all sorts of iterations of alphabet puzzles and games, like putting the alphabet in the correct order, matching lower case letters to uppercase, and matching pictures’ initial sound to the letter. When they ask us how to write a word, we help them sound them out and as they realize the letter for each sound, they write it down. They have all made wonderful strides in their writing and reading skills.
Blocks!
Blocks!
The children have been busy organizing our Block House lean-to, and have made signs for each shape so everyone can see which blocks belong in which spot when it’s clean up time. Some of the blocks we weren’t sure of their “official” name, so the children named ‘em as they saw ‘em! We are looking forward to adding block building to our Choice Time once we’ve all discussed the norms for using that space to keep the creativity flowing while keeping ourselves and our friends safe in the setting. Stayed tuned for fabulous building updates.
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