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

Dear Families,

We had a great Halloween week!  We had all kinds of fun activities this week, and some special activities too!  This is our last week in the Farm Unit, next week we will be starting our Colors unit.  Here are some of the fun things we did this week.

We brought our gait trainers out to the playground.  The Spunky Monkeys love helping us move in the gait trainers.  They make sure to tell us to move our legs to practice walking.  They spend most of playground time walking next to the gait trainers and cheering on the Barnyard Buddies to keep them moving.

On Monday, we read Big Pumpkin.  We practiced using our hands and pulling the pumpkin, just like the characters did in the story.  For arts and crafts, we practiced our bilateral coordination and hand strength to decorate papers with dot markers.  In the afternoon we had our sensory pool.  We played in some very scary spider webs!

On Tuesday, we read Apples and Pumpkins.  We explored our vocabulary words "apple", "in" and "pumpkin".  We practiced holding objects and placing them "in" containers.  For arts and crafts, we made spider webs out of yarn and glue.  It was very messy but we had a lot of fun!    

 In the afternoon, we had show and tell!  Ryan brought in something special to show us.  We explored our new tactile visual representation for show and tell.  Then we took turns asking questions.  Ryan picked each friend to have a turn, and Vraj and Josh got to choose a question to ask using visuals and our buttons.  Then we explored the show and tell bag to see if we could guess what was inside.  Finally, Ryan took his toy out and shared it with all of us!  

On Wednesday, we had a special activity! The Spunky Monkeys came to visit our classroom for a science experiment.  We made "witches brew".  We took turns pouring the ingredients into the bowl and mixing up our concoction. At the very end, we put in our "magic ingredient" and watched our brew bubble and expand!

Thursday was our Halloween parade!  Our teachers dressed up as Snow White, Ariel, and Little Red Riding Hood.  We also had Olaf, Sock Monkey, and a Minion!  We went up to central office and showed off our Halloween costumes.  We met lots of new people!  Vraj and Dr. Conti (the superintendent) were both minions this year!  Olaf slept through most of the parade, but woke up at the very end to give everyone a quick hello before we went back to our classroom.  

On Friday, we practiced our Trick or Treating.  We didn't wear our costumes this time, but we practiced using our buttons to say "trick or treat" and "thank you".  Everyone did a great job of using their buttons to communicate.  Josh didn't come to school on Friday, but Vraj and Ryan brought back some special toys for him. 

-The Barnyard Buddies