Dear Parents,

We had a lot of fun during the second week of our Farm Unit.  We had some technical difficulties with our ipad, so unfortunately, we don't have any pictures this week.  I'm very sorry.  

We had a very busy week!  I'd like to thank everyone for coming to our Back to School night on Wednesday!  We greatly appreciate all of your ongoing support and input.  Together we are making a very successful classroom!

We added some new activities to our Morning Meeting this week.  This week we incorporated some wrist bells to go with our hello song.  We are still using our scarves, but sometimes we are a little bit lazy about waving the scarves by ourselves! So I think adding bells to our song might give us some more incentive.  By using the scarves and bells, we are trying to shape waving.  Using buttons and communication devices are great, but sometimes people say hello to us and we don't have any of those things close at hand, so waving is another option to respond to social greetings.  We also incorporated some new weather tactiles to go with our visuals.  We are still singing our weather song, and now we are getting used to exploring different kinds of weather and how each one looks and feels.  With the weather tactiles, we are teaching our students to associate a symbol with the weather, so that later on we can start labeling the weather outside by finding the corresponding symbol.  So far, everybody is very interested in touching the symbols!  Josh and Vraj like to feel the cloud symbol best, because it's fluffy.  Ryan likes the sun because it has gold glitter on it!  

This past week we worked very hard on finishing our All About Me books!  We explored different colors, chose our favorite color, and made a crayon collage to put into our books.  We also explored our reflections to see what color our eyes and hair were.  On Thursday, we learned all about circles!  We explored the shape of a circle, traced it with our fingers, and made a friendship craft out of different circle shapes.  We will be sending it home this coming week to show our families!  

We also have some new songs to sing for our farm unit!  We are singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Down on Grandpa's Farm, Pumpkin Patch, and Autumn Leaves.  We also carried over our Five Red Apples song from our previous unit, because all the kids loved those bell trees!   In our Itsy Bitsy Spider song, each student gets a large spider to hold.  During the song, we are focusing on our "up" and "down" vocabulary words, and using our hands to move our spiders up and down.  In our Down on Grandpa's Farm song, we are taking turns choosing or identifying farm animals to sing about.  We program the animal noises onto a button, and the kids are taking turns pressing the button to hear the animal noises.  Our Pumpkin Patch song is everyone's new favorite!  I placed battery operated tea lights inside plastic pumpkins.  Each student gets a turn "hiding" in the pumpkin patch.  I place a blanket over our heads and they can watch the glowing pumpkins as we sing our song.They were all mesmerized!  In our Autumn leaves song, each student has a felt tree with plastic leaves.  We sing our song and practice using our visual motor and hand strength to reach out and take a leaf off of the tree.  

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

-The Barnyard Buddies