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

Dear Families,

I apologize for the late blog post! We had some fun activities this week!

On Monday, we read our Big Pumpkin story, and planted pumpkin seeds, just like the witch in the story!  We started out by talking about the book, and exploring all of the items we were going to use in our science experiment, like "pumpkin", "dirt", and "seed".   The barnyard Buddies practiced visual tracking and bilateral coordination as we poured cups of dirt into our bowls.  Then we used our pincer fingers to hold on to a pumpkin seed and push it into the dirt.  We finished by using our hands to squeeze a water bottle.  Vraj wasn't here this day, but Josh and Ryan wanted to be good friends, so they planted an extra pumpkin seed for Vraj so that he could grow a pumpkin too!

On Tuesday, Josh was the only friend who came to school!  So we had a special day in the Busy Bee and Spunky Monkey classrooms!  

On Wednesday and Thursday, we had rainy days.  We decided to use our gait trainers in our indoor playground!  Well, although everyone was very happy about being in the middle of all the action in the "Big Room", we were a little lazy about walking!  It seemed we preferred when all the other kids would come up to us to play.  So Miss Shannon worked us very hard to get our legs moving!  I think, once we get used to all the action and friends, it will be a nice motivator to get those gait trainers moving!  

So far, we haven't had a chance to get our "library" day going on Thursdays.  I haven't forgotten!  But what I would like to do is send home manipulatives and ideas for you to use with the books in order to get the most out of reading time.  Please keep in mind it is not mandatory to read the books we send home on the weekends.  Weekends are often very busy times.  It's just an extra activity for you to do with your child, or for a sibling to do with them if you have some free time.

Everybody seemed a little tired on Friday, (maybe from all the rain) so we had a little lazy day on Friday.  We worked on using buttons and touch screens to play and access our storybooks.    

Don't forget, this Thursday is our Halloween parade!  I know on the note it says send your child to school in their costume, but I think it'd be easier to send your child in in their regular clothes and send the costume in their backpack or a bag.  Thank you, and have a great weekend!

-The Barnyard Buddies

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