Dramatic Play
Choo! Choo! Welcome aboard the City Sprouts train! We have been having loads of fun dressing up as train engineers and conductors while pretending to take our passengers to different locations, such as the zoo, the park, and South America! Before we board the train, we make sure to purchase our tickets at the booth and pack our luggage. Much to our surprise, however, our train constantly breaks down or we encounter broken train tracks in the middle of our journey! Luckily, we have skilled handymen on staff, who are always available and ready with their tools, to help fix the train and tracks and get us back on track.
Block Area
When we’re not at our train station, we enjoy playing with the trains and train tracks with our friends. We connect the tracks together in different ways to create various routes and try our best to eventually create one gigantic loop. Sometimes, we will add road signs and arrows along our tracks and try to follow them as we move our trains along the tracks. The trains remind us of characters from one of our favorite books, “The Littlest Train,” and we love discussing with our peers which characters our trains are as we play.
Quiet Area
On some days, we like looking at books by ourselves, with peers, and/or with a teacher. Some of our favorites these past few weeks include: “The Little Engine that Could,” “Clark the Shark,” “Dinosaurs in My School,” and “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” We also really enjoy playing with the puppets. With our friends, we engage in pretend play with the puppets and occasionally walk around the room with them, pretending to eat various objects and even our teachers’ hair and fingers!
Music Area
In music class, we have been learning and dancing to many new songs. Some of our new favorites include, “Jam, jam, jam,” “PB & J,” “Three Little Witches” and “5 Little Pumpkins,” which we have been singing frequently throughout the day since Halloween is approaching. We also enjoy tapping the rhythm sticks together and using them to imitate the actions of using a saw, ax, screwdriver, paint brush, ladder, and telescope when we sing a song about building a tree house. When we’re not using the rhythm sticks, we parade around in a circle pretending to be monsters doing the creeper walk. In addition, we are always excited to dance with the scarves! Our favorite parts of scarf dancing are throwing the scarf up into the air and catching it, as well as hiding under it and revealing our faces when we hear the word “Boo!” in the song. We have also been practicing mindfulness as we lay on our scarves and listen quietly to the sound of bells. We also like listening to the sound of the rain sticks and creating our own melodies with them.
Art Area
At Mano’s, we have been exploring the concept of abstract art. We have learned that art can be anything and does not need to look a certain way. We were very excited when we had the opportunity to create our own abstract drawings by putting pieces of tape on paper, doodling over it with markers, and ultimately removing the tape to see the design that was left. At school and at Mano’s, we have been painting pumpkins in an assortment of colors and decorating them with sequins and pompoms to create silly, scary, and happy pumpkins for Halloween. We’ve also been celebrating friends’ birthday by painting canvases using their selected colors.
Gross Motor Area
Like the previous weeks, we still love climbing the rungs on the indoor climbing structure and sliding down onto the mattress. It is also exciting when we climb up the slide and go down the rungs too! In yoga class, we have been practicing balancing on one leg as we do tree pose and airplane pose. We also go into rock pose to relax our bodies and sometimes pretend to be Halloween cats or spiders in cat pose or spider pose. We also enjoy moving our bodies when dancing along to the shimmies, as well as going into down dog and frog pose in the song “Black Dog in the River.”
Cognitive Area
Lately we have been very interested in the Magnet Tiles. We enjoy putting the different shapes together in a variety of ways to create such things like buildings, cakes, pizzas, trucks, castles, train tracks, and gates. We also like working by ourselves or together with our friends to complete the magnetic maze puzzles.
Outside Area
With Halloween coming up, we have been drawing pumpkins, bats, spiders, and spider webs with chalk in the driveway. We also enjoy tossing the hula hoops onto the structure and taking them down to then pretend to be buses. It’s also been challenging but fun to try to keep the hoops up around our waist when we swing them around our bodies. On any given day, we might lay the hoops on the floor and create an obstacle course, where friends have to jump from one hoop to the next, or slide the hoop around the backyard. Besides the hula hoops, we love pretending to be monsters and chasing each other around, as well as creating airplanes and trains with the blocks and organizing our pretend play around those creations.
Pumpkin Patch
Our adventure to the pumpkin patch has been especially exciting! We got to see turkeys and play with our friends in the hay maze and tunnels. We were fascinated to see the tremendous amount of different sized and shaped pumpkins and had fun climbing on them, trying to carry them, and rolling them around. Undoubtedly, our favorite part of the pumpkin patch was going on the hay ride and seeing the stuffed animals that were laying around.
Big Truck Day
Another exciting adventure was Big Truck Day! On this adventure, we took a long bus ride to explore all sorts of vehicles, including the Muni bus, fire truck, recycling and garbage truck, dump truck, excavator, street cleaning truck, and digger. It was fascinating to see all the different vehicles, and we especially loved going inside them and pressing their buttons, honking their horn, and listening to the sounds they made. Of course, we loved walking around as construction worker superheroes too!