Today we are starting our trip to the Far East.  We will concentrate on China, but we will also learn some interesting facts about Japan.

During this unit the class will watch the video, Big Bird In China.  This is an excellent story that entertains as it teaches about the culture, geography and people of China.  The children will be introduced to the mythical character, The Monkey King, who will lead Big Bird on an interesting journey through China.

If your child has a karate suit or kimono, please send it to school for wearing in our little tea-house.  I have several myself, but it is fun to have a selection.

We will have lessons on bamboo, Pandas, writing Chinese characters, festivals, games and food.  Our stories, art and music will round out our study.  It is so exciting to watch the children learn about this fascinating part of our world.

PLEASE HAVE YOUR CHILD WEAR SHOES THAT CAN BE SLIPPED ON AND OFF EASILY. We will remove our shoes to play in the little tea-house.  Your child will need to wear socks or send a pair of socks that we can keep at school.

As usual, we welcome any items you would share with us for our display shelf.

Tsai Chien (good-bye),  Eileen    

UNIT

March 26th - April 19th

We begin a four week unit celebrating Spring.  This unit we will learn about plants: what plants need in order to grow, parts of a plant, food and medicine from plants, people that work with plants, and we will plant seeds and grow our own plant.

This time of year we see many insects appearing with the warmer weather.  We will learn about many of these insects:  ladybugs, butterflies, ants and honeybees.

The spring is a time for changing weather patterns.  There is a weather station in our classroom where we will post the forecast for the day.  We will learn about thunderstorms, wind and extreme weather.

Easter will be observed with stories, crafts and celebrations.  We will have our daily Bible stories from our lovely children’s bible of the events leading up to our glorious Easter day.

We finish our month of Spring learning about color in our world.  We will answer the question of where color comes from, how we get different shades and tints of color.  We will “break” open the sun beams with prisms and see the rainbows.

What a beautiful time of year!

The life and work of cowboys past and present will be presented to our class.  Although we talk about cowboys, the children will learn that women have an equal part in running a ranch and tending to cattle.

Our study will be enriched with several activities.  The children and parents will make their own stick horses. The class will go on a cattle drive where we will look for special land marks and “critters”, cook a cowboy breakfast, participate in a rodeo and cook-out, learn songs sung around a campfire, learn about and create their own brands, and hear stories and tall tales about life on the range.

We will complete our unit with learning about our great state of Texas.  The children will learn the pledge to the Texas flag and our state song.  Cutting out a BIG map of Texas and creating a pictorial map of our state will teach the children the  diversity of our state.

Tomorrow we will start a three-week unit about Space.  The children will hear a book,     Me And My Place In Space. The book sets the tone for our lessons with words about the universe, galaxies, solar systems, planets, stars, suns, and space exploration.

We will learn about our daytime star, the sun.  We will do experiments with the globe and a flashlight to demonstrate why we have night and day.  We will make “pictures in the night sky” after learning about the constellations.  The children will also learn to identify the Big and Little Dippers, Orion the Hunter and the North Star.

The last week of the unit we will learn about Space exploration and the Astronauts.

One of our class projects during this unit is to construct a life size robot—-Charlie 22!  The children will design, paint, and decorate our new friend.  Please look around your house and garage for any old and odd hardware, colorful plastic items, buttons, trinkets, etc.

Happy New Year! It is good to be back in the routine of school. We had a great holiday, but we really missed the children.

As you can tell by our room, the dinosaurs have taken over. They will be with us for the month of January along with the study of rocks, fossils and volcanoes. We will learn about the work of paleontologists. The children will have a chance to do their own discovering and constructing in our Dinosaur Museum. We will learn about fossils and make fossil footprints, leaf prints and shell prints in clay and plaster. The children will learn the characteristics of the meat eater dinosaurs and the plant eaters. We will discuss the major dinosaurs, the ones the children are most familiar with. Please come in and have your child give you a tour.

As I told you before we left for our Christmas holiday, I want the children to start their own rock and fossil collection. Friday, January 27th we will have our Rock and Fossil Show for the school. CHECK OUT THE PICTURES ON OUR BULLETIN BOARD OF OUR SHOW IN THE PAST. YOU CAN SEE HOW THE CHILDREN HAVE PUT TOGETHER THEIR COLLECTIONS. You do not need to bring the collection until the morning of the show.

During this unit we will take a trip to the Texas Memorial Museum at UT to see the dinosaur exhibit. I will let you know ASAP when we make plans.

We begin our letter lessons again. Our letter this week is Ss. Keep those picture words coming in.

We will celebrate Epiphany (it was January 6th) in class. I will read the account of when the Wise Men arrive to visit Baby Jesus. In honor of Three Kings Day, the children will decorate their gold crown with jewels. Wednesday they will wear them to chapel.

More special days this month:
Tuesday, January 10th will be a staff meeting day so there will not be any Angel Play or Discovery that day.
Monday, January 16th is a holiday for MLK Day.

A reminder about the Sight Word books: I want the children to enjoy the little book and learning to “read” the text and sight words. The children will actually be memorizing the pages, but this will help in their left to right tracking of the words across the page. There is no time limit on the books. Whenever your child is ready and looking forward to “reading” their book, send it on. Vanessa will keep track of each child’s books as we begin to trade books around. There will be a chart on the wall with each child’s name. When they have successfully read their book, they will get a gold star to keep a record of books read. Have fun with this pre-reading activity!

We are beginning a study of Children of the World Celebrate Christmas.  For this unit I would like each child to bring his/her genealogy and countries of origin.  Please fill out the family tree page you will find on your child’s hook.  We will locate countries on our large world map.  We will make decorations from England, Sweden, France, Germany and Italy.  The children will learn to identify the flags of these countries also.

I would like each family to write their holiday traditions–cookie baking, visiting relatives, tree purchase and decorating, looking at Christmas lights, special meals and menus, etc.  We  read these in circle time.  The children love this!  I will be sending a special paper home for your use. The main comment I hear is how happy parents are to get down on paper the things that are so important to each of us at this time of year.  This page will go in your child’s memory book.

In our creative play area I have made a travel agency.  As we learn about a country, the children will be able to book a flight and go for a visit. ( We always have a huge demand for Disney World no matter how attractive I try to make other trips.)  I will make passports for the children and give them a little paper suitcase for their travels.

In the short time we have before the holidays we will also be practicing for our beautiful pageant.  All the four year old classes and our pre-K class will be angels.  We have the costumes.  I need  some volunteers to press the costumes-see me if you are interested.  Also we will need help dressing the angels before the pageant.)  Your child will need to wear a white shirt and dark pants/skirt.   Please practice  the first verse of “Silent Night”  and the chorus of “We Three Kings”.  These are the most difficult songs for the children.   Make this fun—not a practice session.

We will observe Advent in our classroom.  We have an Advent wreath and calendar that we will use daily.  Also I will teach the children the story of The Jesse Tree.  Through the symbol ornaments we will trace Jesus’ human roots back through the House of David and David’s father, Jesse.  Each ornament (drawn for a young child) is a symbol of an ancestor or an event leading up to the birth of Christ.

Christmas Party, Dec. 15th at 12:00/Christmas Pageant, Dec. 16th at 11:00

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2nd IS OUR FIELD TRIP TO ZACHARY SCOTT THEATER to see their delightful Christmas show, “Holiday Heroes”.  We will leave for the theater at 9:00  The play starts at 9:45.  We are to check in no later than 9:30.  Sign up for carpools on our web page.    Adults going on the field trip must have had the Safe Guarding God’s Children training.   YOUR CHILD MUST WEAR A ST. MATTHEW’S SHIRT IN ORDER TO GO ON FIELD TRIPS.  SHIRTS ARE AVAILABLE IN THE OFFICE.

It is a blessing to share this special time in our church year with your children.

Eileen

With the Fall season and the approach of Thanksgiving, our thoughts turn to the Native Americans who have given us such a rich heritage of our country.

Bringing this heritage to the children is so important in their appreciation of the people who were here first.

We will explore the culture of tribes from four different parts of the country. From The Plains tribes- The Sioux, from the Southwest- The Hopi and The Navajo, from the Northwest- The Tlingit and The Haida, and from the Northeast-The Wampanoags.

The children will be learning songs, games, stories and crafts from all of these tribes. The class is a little amazed that Mrs. Cole has an Apache ancestor in my family tree!

Our next unit will be “What’s Inside?”  For the next two weeks we will explore what is inside apples, pumpkins, lunch boxes, a bat cave, a spider web, and anything else that catches our attention and curiosity.

We will also learn what is inside Our Wonderful Body Machine.  The children will meet Henrietta, a  little girl that will teach them about nutrition.  The children will learn the basic food groups.  Each day at lunch we will discuss what everyone has in their lunch and how many food groups are represented.    I have set up a little doctor’s office in our creative play area.  The children love this, as they are the ones that get to give the shots!

We will have a day devoted to apples.  The children will taste three varieties of apples:  Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and Green Granny.  We will make a graph of the choices.  Each child will bake a little apple pie.  The children will learn about Johnny Appleseed, make a hand print apple and find the star in every apple.

The second week of the unit we will learn about spiders.  This is the time of year that spiders are on the move.  Perhaps one of you will be lucky enough to capture a tarantula.  If so, please send it to school for our observation.  In honor of the spiders, the children will bake their own dough spider roll, weave a spider web, and make a jumping spider.

Excitement is building for Halloween.  I think the decorations in the room will really get things going!

I am looking forward to our conferences this week.  

We are beginning a three-week unit on Africa and Safari.  As the unit progresses we will be learning about life in a zoo. If your child would like to bring a stuffed zoo animal to school, that would be fine.

I will first give the children a few facts about Africa and the people that live there.  We will locate Africa on the globe and on our world maps.  The children will make a simple relief map showing the three regions of Africa: the desert, the rainforest, and the grasslands. We will talk about houses, language, food, clothing, art and crafts, games and the animals that live in Africa.  We will go on a picture-taking Safari as we learn about the lion, elephant, zebra and giraffe.  The rain forest will also be one of our lessons.  Finally we will learn about zoos and how people take care of the wonderful animals.

We start our Barker Dog letter lessons Monday.  We will have our lesson at 9:15 each Monday.  Your child should be at school by 9:00 to get settled for the lesson.   Mrs. Race’s class will join us for the letter lesson.

Last week we “wrote” our first stories for our yearbook.  Many thanks to the parents that were on hand to guide the children with their stories.

Take time to look around our African room with your child.