Dear Families,

Our February unit theme is Opposites.  We haven't had a lot of time to focus on our books and activities with all of our snow days, but we have some fun books and activities to look forward to.  The books that we will be reading for this unit have themes related to opposites, and we are also including additional language to emphasize these points in the stories.

The opposites concepts we will be exploring in this unit are those that we can explore and understand from a tactile perspective, as well as visually.  

Goodnight Gorilla-  While Goodnight Gorilla is primarily a picture book, we added additional language to incorporate more language about opposites.  We will be exploring the words "In" and "Out" as we read and take our animals in and out of their cages, just like Gorilla does in the story.

Better Move on Frog- In this book, Frog is looking for a home, but all of the holes that he finds are already full.  With this book we are exploring the concepts of "Full" and "Empty" as we feel various containers with objects inside.  

Opposnakes-  Opposnakes is a fun book because we can explore many kinds of vocabulary relating to opposites.  We get our own snakes (accordion tubes) and copy the opposites in the book, like big/small, fast/slow, hot/cold, straight/tangled, and one/many.  

Titch- Titch is a little boy who only gets small things, while his big brother Pete gets big things.  We use doubles of various tactiles for our students to feel, look at, and compare to help us understand the differences between big and small.  




For Arts & Crafts this past week we made up all of the Snow Unit activities that we missed from the last storm!  We made snow globes, we painted snowflakes on to coffee filters, and we painted Peter in the snow from our Snowy Day book.  




Our Music for our Opposites Unit:

It's Music Time-  This is a brand new song that we are incorporating in to our music time.  It's based on our Music Therapy kit.  This song helps us get ready for music time by first getting our bodies ready and using our instruments to play along, then using our buttons to participate in the singing, followed by using our voices with our echo-microphones!  We brought out our echo-microphones for play times this week to help develop a cause and effect relationship between the students' vocalizations and the auditory effects of the microphone.  It took some time to catch it at the right time, but all the kids got a big kick out of hearing their own echoes on the microphones!  We're hoping that with more exposure, we can continue to develop our intentional vocalization skills.  

5 Little Monkeys-  In our case, 4 little monkeys!  Each child gets a turn to bounce on our big red ball as we sing 4 Little Monkeys.  The other three students have a button so that they can follow along and finish our song with "No more monkeys jumping on the bed".  We also program our buttons to request a turn to bounce on the ball.

5 Little Snowmen- This is our counting song!  We have snowmen made out of bells.  When we finish each set, we use our fine motor strength and visual/motor control to pull off one of our snowmen.  Then we practice our one to one correspondence as we count the snowmen that are left.

Chubby Little Snowman-  In the original song, a Bunny comes along and bites the snowman's carrot nose.  In our song, our snowman has oral motor toys as a nose!  We sing this song a few times, and each time the snowman has a different nose (Nuk, spoon, toothette, P) and instead of a Bunny, the Barnyard Buddies come along and bite the snowman's nose!




-The Barnyard Buddies