Dear Families,

We have some catching up to do!  For the month of December, we are in our Nursery Rhymes/Fairy Tales unit.  During story time, we are reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs, There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and The Gingerbread Man.



This week for Arts&Crafts, we painted our three little pigs and made houses for them.  Each friend got to choose which house they wanted to paint, and we had lots of fun feeling the straw, sticks, and "bricks" (legos).

Last week we had some extra special visitors come for show and tell!  Some elves came down from the North Pole to visit the Barnyard Buddies.  The elves are watching all of our good behavior, and is reporting back to Santa at night.  Scout the Elf is here for Vraj, Buddy the Elf is here for Ryan, and Jolly the Elf is here for Josh.  These elves are very silly, and were caught doing some funny things this week.  One day we caught the elves taking naps with the kids!  Another day we found the elves sitting in the kids' wheelchairs!  We can't wait to see what these silly elves do next week...

We also had a special activity on Wednesday,  The Busy Bees came to visit us during Sensory Pool time!  We played in some holiday tinsel, and had bells, elves, toy snowmen, and a Christmas tree in our pool.  We had a blast!

Here are some more fun pictures from the past few weeks!

-The Barnyard Buddies

Dear Families,

For the past two weeks, we have been on our Color Unit!  We are reading some new books about colors, singing new songs, and we have all kinds of great arts and crafts activities to learn about our colors.  Here are the books we are reading.


In our Dog's Colorful Day book, Dog goes on an adventure and gets lots of colored spots on his fur coat.  When we read the story, we are working on identifying colors and putting them on our own velcro dogs.  When Dog goes for a bath, we practice using our finger strength to pull off Dog's spots. Our main character is Dog, and our vocabulary words are our color words, "on", and "off".

In our Brown Bear Brown Bear book, we have "What do you see?" programmed on to our buttons.  We are taking turns pressing the button to help read the story.  We also have felt characters for us to practice matching and identifying.  Our vocabulary words are our color words.  

In our Cat's Colors book, we each have our own book with colored pages to go along with the story.  We are working on touching different textures and turning the pages of a book.  Our main character is Cat, and our vocabulary words are our color words and "turn the page".

In Mouse Paint,  we each have a white mouse to hold as we read our story.  We are visually exploring colored plastic, that when we hold it up to our eyes, it turns everything to a color.  Our vocabulary words are our color words, "in" and "mix".  

Last week we made Oobleck for our science experiment.  

On Wednesday, we had our sensory pool.  We had balls in the sensory pool. Josh loved the big red Ribit ball because it made crinkly noises when he held it.  Vraj liked the little orange spiky balls.  He was very interested when we put them on his hands!

For Arts & Crafts this week, we mixed glue and watercolors to make sun catchers, we squeezed glue on to black paper and added colored sand, and we  also colored pictures with markers.

We also got a new "Little Room" this week.  A little room is an enclosed space on three sides, where kids can go in and explore various toys and items.  Karen (Vision), Laura (OT) and I are working together to add items to the ceiling and sides that will interest the students and engage them in some independent play.  We also have buttons attached to lights and music so that your child can press the buttons to activate the toys at their leisure.  Josh was the first friend in the Little Room.  He loved the red lights!

We also spent some time in the big room during our playground this week, since the snow made the playground too wet and slippery.  

-The Barnyard Buddies