We love the zoo!

What a great day to go to the zoo!  We practically had the place to ourselves and it hardly rained at all!  We visited Point Defiance Zoo as part of our unit on the Arctic and Antarctica.  We attended a class on Arctic animals and then got to see the animals up close.  The opportunity to see the animals and touch their fur,  antlers, and bones makes a real impression on the kids.  They will retain more of what they have learned in the classroom because of this experience.  Besides all the good educational reasons for going, we had a lot of fun!

The music program was terrific.  It always amazes me how confident these young children are.  Not a single case of stage fright among them!  Thanks for braving the snow to join us.

This is the time of year when the we are really hitting our stride in the classroom.  All of the adjustment issues are behind us, the screening has been completed for placement in reading and math groups, and everyone knows the routine.  Now is the time when we see the most growth, and wow,  have we seen tons of growth just since winter break.  Everyone is reading now and enjoying their success.  Math is getting easier and more fun.  The children are working more independently and accomplishing so much.

We spend a lot of our time working on reading and language skills.  Our most independent readers are reading chapter books that average about 110 pages in a week's time.  Our beginning readers read to each other and the dogs and are now really happy to be reading.  We are working on writing words and making sentences.  Today the word cards were all over the floor and the kids created sentences with a subject and a verb.  They had a great time learning about people, places , things and action words.  It is amazing how much power there is in the written word and they are beginning to enjoy that power!

It's good to be back at school!

It's so good to be back!  I don't know who was more excited to be back at  school, the kids or us!  We jumped right back into our routine and started a new unit of study.  This month we're learning about the Arctic, Antarctica and the animals that live there.  Did you know there are hundreds of different kinds of penguins?  They all live south of the Equator but not necessarily in icy conditions.  Those are just a couple of the facts we've learned this week.  Each of the children has picked an animal they would like to know more about and we've been doing some research on them.  This week we'll be making an environment for our animals.

To finish out our first week back at school, we had the opportunity to go see "Lyle the Crocodile" at Seattle Children's Theatre.  It was wonderful!  The children were spellbound for the whole 2 hour performance.  It's been a good week!