Dear Families,



Welcome back to school!  We have some new staff in our classroom, so for the past few weeks we've been showing our new teachers all of the great things we can do!  Lindsay, Katie, and Liz are our new teachers.  Caitlin and Katelin are returning from last year, and Rosie has returned as our classroom nurse.  This week we've started our Farm/Harvest unit!  We are learning about farm animals and their sounds and Halloween!  We are also working on using our buttons to participate in story time and anticipate predictable text.  Here are our unit books.




At the bottom of the blog you can find the rest of our Library books that will be coming home for this unit!


B00!-  In our story Boo!, we listen to a "ghostly" sound as we try and figure out what Halloween creature made the sound.  We ask an owl, a witch, a spider, a cat, and a pumpkin, and we use our buttons to help the characters say, "It wasn't me!"  Then we find out it was a BIG light up ghost!

The Little Red Hen-  In the Little Red Hen, the hen asks her friends; the dog, cat, and mouse to help her do chores around the house.  We have our hen, dog, cat, and mouse characters to look at and hold as we read our story.  We use our buttons to help read as her friends say "Not I"

The Little Old Lady who wasn't Afraid of Anything-  In the Little Old Lady who wasn't Afraid of Anything, our little old lady goes for a walk in the forest and stumbles on some different articles of clothing.  We use our own feet to walk with the little old lady, and when she sees the clothes in the road we have clothes to touch and look at too!  We also use our buttons to help the little old lady say "I'm not afraid of you!"  In the end, all the clothes get together and make a scarecrow in the farm!

The Three Little Pigs-  This is already a classroom favorite!  We have our pig toys and houses to play with as we read our story.  Each house is covered in the materials that the pigs used, so the straw house has straw, the stick house has sticks, and the brick house has legos.  We feel the houses as we read the story and we are working on the concept "In" as we put the piggys in their houses.  But the BEST PART is when the big bad wolf comes along (played by our wolf beanie baby) and we use a fan to "blow" the houses that the kids are holding.  



Arts and Crafts
For arts and Crafts this week, we are working on developing our "Autumn tree" to put in the hallway.  Lots of friends were out sick last week, so we're catching up on some of the other artwork from last week and then we'll be exploring leaves and making different colored leaves to put on our tree.  We are also working on our alphabet book, but that'll be a surprise until it's all done! 

Choice Time
Our choice time activities switch out on a bi-weekly basis.  We want to give the kids enough time to explore and familiarize themselves with the toys, but we also want to keep them curious and exploratory.  For this week and next week, our toys are the light box, spinning toys, and the activity arches.  Switch activated toys are always available and this weeks' switch toys are the bubble machine and the musical  butterfly.  Books are also always a choice and switch out monthly along with our classroom unit/theme.  




Here are our other storybooks for this unit that we use for our book area and for library time.





-The Barnyard Buddies