Dear Families,


Our first two week of our farm/harvest unit went well.  We planted "pumpkin" seeds, counted farm animals, organized apples in ascending order, made apple trees, played a BINGO game with vegetables, made AB farm animal patterns, used different materials to texture farm animals, and made tissue paper apples for our bulliten board. 

This week in our farm/harvest unit, we will make apple pizza, play a farm animal memory game, experiment and graph an apple taste test, sort objects that do and do not belong on the farm, and conduct a heavy/light experiment with different farm related items. 

If you haven't already done so, please send in the permission slip for our farm field trip on October 20th.  Thank you!

-The Barnyard Buddies

Dear families,


We had a great second week of school!  We finished up our "All About Me" unit and created books about each child, so we can read them in our library area for the next few weeks. 

On Monday we'll be starting our Farm/Harvest unit.  This week we will learn what a garden is, what a farm is, and what kind of work needs to be done on a garden/farm. 


Here are the books we will be reading

                                               


Small groups

Making apple trees
                  matching number to quantity
                  OT- using pincer grasp to crinkle and glue tissue paper
Planting a garden
                  using common garden tools to create and tend to a plant
Sorting Apples
                  sorting red, green, and yellow apples by color
                  counting apple groups and recording most and least
Sequencing life cycle of a plant
                  learning plant related vocabulary
                  practicing the pre-literacy skill of organizing the sequence of a story
Apple Prints
                 exploring what's on the inside of an apple
                 creating apple prints on a letter A for our alphabet book
Sorting Apples
                 sorting apples by size (big, medium, and small)


If you haven't done so already, please send in the packet you recieved prior to the start of school.  It contains important information that is needed by the secretary and school nurse.  Thank you.

-The Barnyard Buddies

New School Year

Hi Parents,


Welcome to the Barnyard Buddies!  We are going to have a great school year. 


Here is our daily schedule:
8:30-9:00     Arrival/Playground
9:00-9:10     Bathroom
9:10-9:30     Circle Time
9:30-10:00   Choice Time
10:00-10:20 Work Time
10:20-10:40  Snack
10:40-10:50  Story Time
10:50-11:10  Small Group Work
11:10-11:25  Music
11:25-11:30  Dismissal

We had a great first week of school.  Everyone did a great job playing with friends and listening to teachers.  This week and next week we are working on "All About Me" books.  We will spend the next week finishing up our books and putting them in our library so we can learn about each other.  We talked about what we look like and graphed and counted similar characteristics, we drew self-portraits, made pictures of our house and made birthday cakes for how old we are. 

This week we will add our family members to our houses, make a frame for the cover of our books by creating AB patterns, and practice cutting and writing for our portfolios. 

Choice Time:

writing center: letter puzzles
math center: shape sorters
blue table: iPads
green table: puzzles
block area: "brick" blocks and chubby vehicles
library: "old favorites" books (Dr. Seuss, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, The Very Hungry Caterpillar)
Rug: trains
sensory table: sand

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.  conroy@bpsk12.org

-The Barnyard Buddies

Dear families,

This week we are starting a new unit about health and hygiene.  For the next two weeks we will be talking about healthy foods; what kinds of foods are healthy and what they do for our bodies.  This week we will practice using our positional vocabulary words, sorting foods by category, counting healthy foods, making vegetable soup and sorting opposites.

               

Small groups
positional book
sorting healthy foods into colored bowls
counting fruits and matching them to a numeral
sorting healthy and unhealthy foods
making vegetable soup
matching opposites
lacing gumball machines


Choice time
library- books about health and hygiene
green table- Mr. Potato head and iPads
blue table- gears
white table- puzzles
circle rug- foam floor puzzles
block area- brick blocks
dramatic play- kitchen
sensory table- dirt
easel- markers and fruits/vegetables

 

 

 

- The Barnyard Buddies

Dear families,

 
We've enjoyed learning about our senses for the past few weeks.  This past week we learned about our sense of hearing.  We did a sound experiment, where we predicted which toys would make noise, and then tested our hypotheses.  We matched musical instruments that sounded the same, and put different toys inside plastic eggs and used our sense of hearing to find the two eggs that sounded the same.  We identified sounds that were loud and soft, and we listened and matched animal sounds. 


This week we will be finishing up our 5 senses unit by learning about taste and smell.  We will smell different foods that are inside ziploc containers and try to find the one that smells the same.  We will also smell different foods and create a graph of which smells were good and which smells were bad.  We will be painting different fruits with kool aid, so that when the pictures dry the fruits from their picture will smell like the real thing.  For taste, we will do an experiment with different fruits.  The students will try the different fruits and vote on which one likes the best.  Then we will add up all the numbers and see which fruit was liked by the most students.  We will also taste red, yellow, and green apples to see which one we like best, and sort objects onto apples with the same color. 


- The Barnyard Buddies

             

Dear Families,          

I apologize for the temporary hiatus.  We finished up our Dr. Seuss unit and know we're learning about the five senses.  We've been idenifying different body parts (eyes, nose, mouth, tongue, ears, hands and fingers) and how each of the body parts has a special sense (seeing/sight, smelling, tasting, hearing, and touching/feeling).  We explored various objects from our environment; such as food, toys, and musical instruments to see which senses we use when the objects are manipulated. 

This past week we learned about our sense of touch.  We hid different toys inside socks and had to guess which toy was inside.  We touched a variety of textures and used different adjectives to describe them; such as bumpy, smooth, hard, soft, wet, dry, hot, and cold. 


This week we are learning about our sense of sight.  We're mixing primary colors and making predictions about what new color we'll make.  We will use our knowledge of textures from last week to play an ISpy game and we will practice our positional vocabulary and memory to find the missing object in a sequence. 


-The Barnyard Buddies

Dear Families,

We enjoyed the first week of our Dr. Seuss unit. 

We can't wait to read some new Dr. Seuss books this week!  Here are the books we'll be reading at story time...

                                        

                                               

Small Groups

Small groups this week will work on skills including; rote counting, one to one correspondence, sorting pictures by category, fine motor strength and stability, size vocabulary, letter recognition, hand-eye coordination, and shape identification. 

• Sorting pictures to make a "Where do my feet take me" book
• Counting and practicing one to one correspondence by matching Things
• Sorting big, medium, and small Dr. Seuss characters
• Matching animals to their shadows to make a zoo
• Identifying letters of our name with dot markers
• Counting and practicing one to one correspondence by making apples with dot markers

Reminder:
Picture Day is March 9th.  The Barnyard Buddies will be having their pictures taken at 12:00.  We will eat morning snack later than usual so that we can save lunch for after our pictures are taken.  We will have non-messy activities to play with for the day, but if you are concerned that your child may get messy before the picture, then you can send the child to school in regular clothes and we can change them into their picture clothes closer to our designated time.  If this is something you would like to do, please e-mail me conroy@burlington.mec.edu or put a note in the child's backpack so we know that you would like them in a different outfit for their picture. 

-The Barnyard Buddies