Letter P!

Music day

Today was a very special day at MATES -music day! Throughout the day the children had the chance to experience a variety of music in different classrooms on campus.

We started our day with percussion - here you see Arianna, Lincoln and Mary playing the drums.

Next we got to listen to some bluegrass on the banjo and mandolin.

Next we saw a ballerina dance to the Nutcracker and lucky us she needed some dance helpers!

Here you see Dominick and Marlaina being her dance statues.

There were also some jazz dancers - including our very own dance teacher!  In this photo Simran and Mary are helping to demonstrate the concept of negative space when dancing.

Here Abby, Blake and Rishi are demonstrating the same concepts.

The last performance of the day - and the one most of the kids said was their favorite - was a mariachi band! Our own Mr. LaGuardia joined them for a song.

Busy Making Words!

This week we got down to business as we finally had our first vowel visit our class! Hooray! We can make words now! Check out some of the fun activities we did with "a". The students learned that "a" is  super hero letter. They learned that "a" is in disguise when it makes the "short a" sound. The letter "a" pretends to be lazy and sit and eat apples all day long. Every time she eats an apple, she says "Ah, Ah, Ah". When she is not in disguise, she gets to say her super power name (long a). Ask your child about these super powers! They will get a kick out of teaching you.

We learned about the "at" family and built many words. We used our iPhones to send "at messages".

Daily 4! During Daily 4, the students get practice working independently and building their reading and writing skills. Take a look at some of the hard work they did today!

Abby used our new sight words "to" and "go" and wrote all of these sentences by herself! She wants to go to Boston, Maine, Hawaii and Mexico! Sounds like a great trip to me.

Arianna got cozy in the book nook while independently reading.

Carine found a special spot in the teacher's chair to read her book.

Dominick is going to take a trip to Mars! We have a future astronaut here.

Stella built more "at" words on the iPad.

Hailey built at words using our smart board.

Letter a video

Our new letter is Nn!

Please bring in a mystery bag for the letter Nn.
Here is the N video.  Enjoy!

Our new sight word is "have".

It's Pumpkin Time!

This week we learned about how pumpkins grow and created our own pumpkin life cycles. 

We read lots of pumpkin books including our favorite -5 Little Pumpkins - which we now know by heart ;)

We used tear art to make the pumpkins in our pumpkin patch.

We painted our own pumpkins by mixing colors of paint and wrote about them using our sight words - I can see and the. 

Check out this awesome artwork and writing!

We used different shapes to design pumpkin faces. 

We did some great phonics activities this week!

We sorted words that start with S, M, R, and T and we tried to sound out the words.

We brainstormed our own words for each letter and drew pictures to match.

To practice our sight words we played a "race to the top" sight word dice game.  Here you see Abby counting and tallying her words to see which is winning!

5 Senses Part 2

We explored our sense of touch and played a game where the students had to reach into a bag and feel for items that were soft, smooth, rough, hard and furry. Then we glued the items on the words to match.

Our final sense and probably our favorite was taste!!!

We had a taste test in Room 2 today and the students tasted foods that were sour, sweet, bitter and salty. As you can see from the pictures there were some mixed reviews!

Here you see Mikey and Melissa tasting some sour lemon. 

Here you see Blake tasting the same sour lemon!

Then we wrote about things we like to taste in our Five Senses books.

It was a fun filled week of senses!