We had so much fun on our field trips to the SF Zoo and the Academy of Sciences Aquarium! We love getting to see all the animals we learn about and pretend to be, up close. At the zoo, the petting zoo was one of our favorites, we loved brushing and feeding the goats. We also loved the rainforest area and of course the little puffer train! At the aquarium, the coral reef and scuba divers are definitely our favorite part of the day, but the penguins are also always exciting to watch play, and we love the touch tank too. And you can’t forget the public transportation rides, which are almost as fun as the destination!
February 25th- March 15th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
Our school has turned into an underwater oasis! Luckily, we have our big yellow submarine to take us on all of our adventures. First, we make sure to gear up with all of our scuba diver equipment. We need our wetsuit, oxygen tank, goggles, and net. Once we are set to go, we load into the submarine and head off to explore the ocean. We love peering out of the windows to see what different types of sea creatures we can find such as; sharks, turtles, and whales. Once we even got attacked by an octopus! When we are feeling extra brave we come out of the submarine to try to catch fish with our nets. It is so fun learning about sea creatures and exploring the ocean with our friends.
Nature Area
We love looking into the science viewers and sharing what we see with our friends. We love seeing volcanoes, caves, mountains, and lands that have been destructed by floods and earthquakes!
Block Area
The trains will always be a classic for us. We love how versatile the tracks can be. Some days we feel like building one long line, other days we see how many loops we can make. We have new sea creature toys who have joined the block area! It is so fun to have them swim underneath the bridges and pretend they are in The Bay, but we have to keep an eye out to make sure none of them swim onto the tracks. We have also enjoyed playing with them in the house and making ramps for them to slide down.
Quiet Area
We have so many new books out that teach us about the ocean, scuba divers, and sea creatures. Our favorites are from, “Suzanne Tate’s Nature Series.” Each book talks about different sea creatures that are endangered and how helpful humans, like us, can save them! We enjoy reading these books on our own, with friends, and with teachers. When we’re not reading in the quiet area, we love to play with the babies. We put their clothes on, feed them a bottle, and then take them on adventures!
Music Area
In conjunction with our underwater theme, Teacher Charity has taught us two new songs that we’ve absolutely loved jamming to: “We Love the Beach” and the surfing song. We have so much fun singing and dancing to our old favorites as well, including “Lemonade,” “Happy Fluffy,” “Rockstar,” “May We Be Happy,” and “Where is Thumpkin?”
Art Area
Our ideas of how to use play dough have been expanded by Teacher Edurne who showed us how we could essentially “draw” with play dough. Using our hands, we molded play dough into different shapes and sizes and gently pressed them onto a piece of paper to create landscapes. We also made our own jellyfishes, complete with tentacles, faces, and hair, with colorful tissue paper and feathers. We love coming to school and being welcomed by our jellyfish each day. More importantly, we feel so proud seeing our work being displayed in the classroom and can’t wait to make more art pieces! And finally after waiting patiently for our paper mache hot air balloons to dry, we got to paint them!
Gross Motor Area
We have been having loads of fun learning different sea animal poses with Teacher Jessie! Some new poses we have enjoyed learning are turtle, whale, crab, octopus, jellyfish, dolphin, clamshell, and stingray. We especially love doing shark pose because we sing the baby shark song together while doing it, as well as starfish pose to rest our bodies when we get tired. It feels so good to work out our back muscles during yoga! On days when we are not doing yoga, we enjoy rocking back and forth on our boat while pretending to be fishermen casting nets to capture fish.
Cognitive Area
The translucent color blocks have been our go-to activity, providing us with a creative outlet to explore while also allowing us to express our ideas. We have been using them to build buildings and working with our friends to figure out the best possible arrangement so that we can create the tallest and sturdiest building possible. We have also been creating patterns with the blocks based on their shapes and colors. One day, we discovered that when we place one color block on top of a different color block and look through them from the top, it creates another color! Another activity that we have been highly invested in is the ocean-themed puzzle. Though challenging, we work hard with our friends to piece the puzzle together, starting with the border and then connecting other pieces to it. We feel so accomplished when we figure it out and see the resulting image!
Outside
No matter the weather, we stay busy outside! On stormy, wet days we love splashing in puddles and exploring our possibilities in the mud kitchen. We love getting messy and cooking cupcakes, meatballs, and soup for our friends. We also enjoy going on “mushroom hunts” - seeing what new mushrooms the rain has brought and then building homes around them, so as to protect them. Every now and then we like to add mushrooms to our kitchen creations!
On warm sunny days we love going “surfing” in the sand pit! It is fun to stack the blocks and practice our balance while we surf the waves. Drawing on the chalkboard has also been one of our favorite pastimes. We draw our families, treasure maps, boats, and for more detailed drawings we ask our teachers for help. When we want our creations to come to life, we build with the pipes. We have been creating pirate ships, rocket ships, boats, and tree-houses. This teaches us good teamwork because it takes a lot of friends to build such big things. Whether riding bikes, playing with the pipes/blocks, or swinging, we love being outside!
January 28th-February 22nd Happenings!
Dramatic Play
We have brought the SF Zoo to school! We practice being good zoo keepers by feeding the animals multiple times a day and making sure they stay in their correct homes. It is fun to be in charge of the keys and ensure that all of the cages are locked. Sometimes, when we are feeling extra silly, we like to pretend that we are the animals! We have our friends gently close the cages for us, while we experience what it would be like to be an animal in the zoo. After a long day’s work we even like to pretend to be the water animals, and cool off in the pool. It’s so funny to see how many of us we can fit. We love closing up the zoo at the end of the day and making sure the animals get a good night’s rest.
Nature Area
We have discovered that the magnify glasses can help us on our bear hunts! We use them to look closely at the bear tracks to see which way he could have possibly gone. Our hunt has yet to be successful, but we can assure he is not under the couch!
Block Area
The people and cars in block area have wanted to explore, so we built them roads! Some roads lead to the house where the people can park their cars and then climb the ladder. Other times the roads have towers on them so the cars have to maneuver around them. It is fun to build together and share our ideas with each other. We even found a new way to use the ramps…we ski with them! It is very challenging to try to move, but we love how silly it makes us feel.
Quiet Area
Reading stories is one of our favorite things to do, especially on Love Day when we were extra cozy in our pajamas. It feels so nice to group around a book and look at the pictures with our friends. When there’s no parents or teachers available to read books to us, we don’t fret, we just read by ourselves. We even like to step into the parent role and read to our babies.
Music
Teacher Charity has inspired us so much that we now feel confident to have concerts of our own. Our friend, Ollie, has felt so inspired that he brings his own ukulele to practice alongside her. On days other than Thursday, we grab some scarfs and ribbons and sing any Charity lyrics we can remember. It is fun to explore our music abilities on our own, but we will always love a jam session with Teacher Charity. Some of our current favorites are; “Lemonade,” “Get Your Booty Out of Bed,” and “Scarf Dance.”
Art
Our creativity juices have been flowing this month. We have explored so many different mediums of art. At Mano’s we have practiced our sculpting skills by creating our very own clay monsters. We also explored creating self-portraits with felt. One of our favorites (also the messiest), was playing with paper-mache. We realized that even though our projects might not turn out the way we hoped, it is still fun to go through the experience. It is so cool to see how our friend’s creations end up turning out, as well as our own.
At school we have been doing group projects to help decorate the walls of our classroom. It is exciting to come to school and see our art hanging on the wall. We love creating art for our families and friends, especially with Love Day coming up! Using stickers, glitter, and scissors, we create masterpieces filled with love. The best part is seeing our friend’s faces light up when we put them in their cubbies!
Gross Motor Area
We have been enjoying working on our coordination skills with Teacher Jesse. She has introduced us to a fun new way of yoga called, TOE-ga. It is so silly to try to grab pompoms with our toes, but it really helps us with our balance and focus. We have also learned new animal poses to match the ones in our zoo. A few that we have learned are; penguin, crocodile, cheetah, gorilla, and bear.
Cognitive Area
We have had so much fun building with the Magna Tiles and love showing our creations to our friends and teachers. We’ve built space ships, castles, delivery vehicles with alphabet letters inside, and robots to name a few. The Magna Tiles with wheels remind us of rollerblades so sometimes we try to stand on them and skate, being careful so as to not fall off.
Outside
The weather has been pretty cloudy and rainy lately, but that has not stopped our play, it just means our mud kitchen gets busier! We love getting our hands dirty as we knead lumps of mud to make muffins, pies, and cakes and cooking up lots of yummy dishes for our customers. Aside from dessert, we specialize in making soups, pizzas, and casseroles. Our restaurant not only boasts delicious food to satisfy customers, but on somedays there’s also a live band that performs on stage! We pretend to play the piano and sing songs like “Let it Go” and “I’m Still Standing.” We also entertain our customers by dancing on the stage, sometimes dancing ballet and other times showing our moves by dancing freestyle. When we’re not operating our restaurant and band, we work diligently with our friends and teachers to build trains and boats using the blocks or pipes. This often leads to lots of pretend play about going to the North Pole and being sailors who are searching for hidden treasures while also avoiding sharks and sea monsters in the ocean. We also like reenacting the plots of some our favorite movies, including “The Little Mermaid” and “Coraline.” With all the rain that we’ve been getting, the kale in our garden has grown and we’ve been having them as healthy snacks in between our play. Playing in the rain has been so exciting that we can’t wait until it rains again!
January 2nd- 25th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
At the City Sprouts doctor’s office, we have been working very hard to keep our friends, babies, and teachers as healthy as can be! Before we meet up with the doctor, we call in to book an appointment and then check in at the front desk. We love listening to friends’ and teachers’ heartbeats and breathing with the stethoscope, as well as taking their blood pressure. Much to our surprise, we found that our teachers often have high blood pressure! As part of our routine checkup, we use the otoscope to look into their ears and take their temperature with the thermometer. When our patients have high fevers, we prescribe medicine for them and advise them to get lots of rest! Some of our patients come in with broken/injured legs or arms so we often have to perform surgery on them and put bandages on their wounds. Our favorite part of the day is giving shots to our patients because we understand how important they are to keep us healthy.
Nature Area
We love looking through the animal encyclopedia and have been fascinated with bats and birds in particular. We love learning about their habitats, diets, and characteristics. We also like looking at the different types of bacteria and learning about which ones can make us sick.
Block Area
With new firetrucks and signs, we have been busy in the block area. We love taking the firetrucks out around town to see who needs saving. Usually the house and doctor’s office are the ones that need help. Our favorite is when the fires are in high places and we need to set up all of the ladders. It is most fun when many friends come together and help build one big town and a house where multiple families live. It is exciting that we get to build something new every time!
Quiet Area
When we want to calm our bodies down, we look at books. This time around, we have been enjoying “The Berenstain Bears Go to the Doctor,” “Germs Make You Sick,” and “Corduroy Goes to the Doctor.” We have been reading a lot together with friends and to the stuffed animals and baby dolls too. We also have loved using the couch as a vehicle to take us places together, or as a bed where we act out house rolls and put our friends to bed with blankets and stories.
Music Area
We are still very much obsessed with Jingle Bells and sing it while using the rhythm sticks and egg-shaped maracas to create the beat. We also love dancing along to the music with the ribbon sticks and scarves. On music days with Teacher Charity, we’ve been singing and dancing along to “Happy Fluffy,” “Keep a Green Tree in Your Heart,” “PB & J,” and the peace song. We’ve also been learning about inclusion in the “We Include Everyone” song and love dancing and making up the lyrics to the silly scarf song!
Art Area
We have discovered our new favorite art medium. It’s scissors! We love seeing what different ways we can cut the paper, sometimes only making slits or other times making shapes. It’s most fun when we cut them into super tiny pieces, but we know we’ll have to clean it up at the end. We also enjoy practicing our patience with the stencils. It is challenging, but exciting to see how our drawing will turn out. In art class we have also been exploring different mediums. We recently learned what a Polaroid camera does and were able to see our class pictures instantly. We enjoyed decorating our pictures with paint and washi-tape so we could then give them to our parents a presents!
Gross Motor Area
We have found other ways to play with the ladder and ramp. Our new favorite thing to do is to see what we can slide down the ramp, such as; cars, stuffed animals, people, and balls. It is so funny when the objects don't make it all the way and fall off. In yoga, we continue to practice being present with our bodies. We do this by doing bumble-bee breath, amongst other breathing exercises. We also practice balancing, even though we may fall over sometimes. The newest poses we have learned have been bug poses. Exploring the forest on rainy days has made us very interested in what bugs come out when it’s wet. We love the “deadbug” pose, where we lay on our backs and wiggle our legs in the air. We also love “slug” pose where we crawl on our bellies.
Cognitive Area
Magnatiles have always been our favorite, but just recently we have been working on seeing what different shapes we can create. We have become masters at towers and trains, but now we try to see what we can build with the triangles, like cars and rocket ships. We are also interested in letters and seeing which ones we recognize from our name. It is fun lining them all up and seeing how high we can count.
Outside
The rainy weather has not scared us away, we think rainy days in the forest are the best! We have gone on adventures in search of the biggest puddle. It is so much fun when we get to see how big of a splash we can make. On our puddle search we also found/learned about our new obsession, sourgrass. We know that it’s only a good idea to get it from the forest and not from the street. It has been exciting learning about this edible plant and experiencing that sour taste that reminds us of lemons. In the backyard, we have been busy building, cooking, and swinging. We love being able to fully immerse ourselves in the mud kitchen and not being afraid of getting dirty. The specialties at our restaurant include; rainbow cake, banana bread, hot tamales, witch soup, and cupcakes. When we’re not cooking, we like to pretend the swing is our form of transportation. It is a magic swing that can turn into a spaceship, car, dump truck, ambulance, or rollercoaster. It is really exciting when we see how many friends we can fit on there. We also have a new basketball goal that has been a hit. We are working on our hand-eye coordination to be able to dribble and catch the ball. We love exploring and learning new ways to play outside!
December 3rd-18th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
We have been hard at work at our school construction site! We are very intrigued with the construction workers that we see outside of school and have wondered what their job consists of. Now we know! We love trying to name all of the different tools, but there are so many, sometimes we forget. Our favorite is the measuring tape! We have seen workers use them in our backyard when installing the grass. We try to see how long we can stretch it out and enjoy finding different objects to measure. We’re sure to put up caution tape so that others know we’re busy building. The tools have worked our fine motor skills, as we try to pinch, pull, twist, and hammer. We love building alone or with friends!
Quiet Area
We love books! We continue to enjoy browsing through the animal encyclopedia and reading “Pigs Make Me Sneeze,” our all-time favorite. We’ve also been enjoying “The Little Snowplow,” “Lights of Winter,” and “Making a Difference.”
Music Area
Our weekly jam sessions with Teacher Charity have been a blast! We love singing the welcome song to each of our friends and teachers and stomping our feet to the beat. We’ve been singing songs about light and dancing to some new favorites titled “Get Your Booty Out of Bed” and “Party.” We also revisit some of our favorites too, including the mud song, the we love everyone song, and the building a treehouse song.
Art Area
With Christmas approaching, we’ve been working hard to paint and decorate our star ornaments with different sequins and glitter. It’s also been lots of fun painting on canvas for friends’ birthdays as well as drawing pictures to take home to show our family. At Mano’s, we’ve painted our own Christmas trees and added “ornaments” on them using strips of paper from magazines.
We also loved going to the MOMA with Teacher Edurne and seeing so many different forms of art! We were amazed at the gigantic sculptures of spiders and mosaics. We were intrigued at how we were unable to see the portrait of the person when we were close to the mosaic but then able to see the picture when we stood from afar! Another highlight of this adventure was walking through a huge metal structure and dancing when we got to the middle of it!
Gross Motor Area
We have found new ways to play with the ladder frame. As much as we love sliding down and jumping on the mattress, we love pretending underneath is either a train or a bed. Sometimes we like to bring our animals or babies along for the ride. It is mighty comfortable!
In yoga class, Teacher Jesse has taught us some Christmas poses. We pretended to be Santa’s reindeer, which made us feel very silly! We also tried making “snow angels”, which we wish we could do in actual snow! We love being able to stretch our bodies in new ways and have the chance to get our wiggles out.
Cognitive Area
The magna tiles never get old. We enjoy playing with them everyday! Building trains and houses will always be a classic, but we have come up with new ways to build as well. We love making storage spots, or “garages”, to store things inside of. We have fit animals, people, and even a whole toolbox inside! It is interesting to see how we are able to build around such objects. We have also tried creating mazes for our friends to walk through. We can make different patterns to switch things up. It also fun to see how high we can stack them. It’s so fun to be able to creatively build with our friends.
Outside
We continue to find new ways to build with the pipes and blocks. This month we have been very excited about creating a racetrack with the pipes and toys. We try to make different obstacles that our cars have to get through. With the blocks, we have used them as bridges to cross the river or the “hot lava”. We also use them to create a big pile, or a “camp fire”. We love gathering as many things as possible so that way we can stay extra warm. It’s so fun to pretend camp with our friends. Playing outside has really taught us about teamwork. We have learned the saying “teamwork makes the dream work!” We do enjoy playing alone, but when we communicate and share with our friends, it makes our play so much more fun! We love chasing each other, pushing each other on the swing, building and cooking together. We really can see that when we work together we are able to accomplish so much more.
November 13th-30th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
During the last weeks of November, our pumpkin patch transformed into a picnic space! We make sure to pack everything we need for our picnic, including plates; cups; fruit; drinks; bread; and condiments, and invite our peers and furry creatures to join us. Our favorite part was making delicious sandwiches for our friends to try. Some friends especially loved eating our deluxe, hand-crafted sweet and savory sandwich, which was overstuffed with lettuce, bologne, peanut butter, jam, and tomatoes! Other friends enjoyed more traditional sandwiches. We also liked looking through the binoculars and pretending that we were on the lookout for wild animals, teachers, and friends!
Block Area
The train tracks have continued to be a huge hit. We try to connect all the tracks to create various routes for our trains to travel on. When we’re not playing with the trains, we like setting up ramps at different levels and rolling the ball down them, or playing with the farm animals. We also like driving the fire trucks around the classroom and pretending to be firefighters who will save buildings, toys, and people.
Nature Area
We love looking at the seashells and discussing with our friends about how similar or different they are from each other. We also enjoy looking at the globe and finding San Francisco and other countries that our peers and teachers have visited.
Quiet Area
When we want to take a break from other activities in the classroom, we like reading books with our peers and teachers. Some favorites include: “How Do Dinosaurs Choose Their Pets?” “Curious George Goes Camping,” and “Pigs Make Me Sneeze.” We’ve also loved looking at all the different animals in the encyclopedia and learning about some of their features.
Music Area
Each week we look forward to Thursdays with Charity. We always have a blast singing and dancing to her songs, especially the grateful song; the picnic song that we co-create with her; and the green tree song. We often have these songs stuck in our heads (and in our teachers’ heads) all day. We also loved singing and dancing to the “scarfity-scarf” song and getting our wiggles out in the wiggle song. During the days that we stayed inside because of the Camp Fire, we continued to practice singing and dancing to Charity’s songs, making everyday feel like a “Charity Day!”
Art Area
One of our favorite things to do in the art area is tracing the outlines of figures with assorted pebbles. Not only is this quite peaceful to do, but we also like looking at how the figure turns out with the pebbles on top. Our favorite one, and the one we think is the silliest, is the one with the outline of a face! We’ve also been having lots of fun drawing pictures for our mommies and daddies, as well as making colorful turkeys for Thanksgiving.
Gross Motor Area
When we have lots of energy that we want to get out, we love jumping and wrestling with our friends on the mattress. We also love the thrill of jumping from the slide to the mattress and are working very hard to jump even farther!
Cognitive Area
Our love for creativity often attracts us to the Magna Tiles, which we use to build all sorts of objects, such as castles, houses, trains, and airplanes. We especially love playing with the magnetic maze board and tracing lines with the magnetic pen. Although the maze is challenging, we feel very proud of ourselves when we figure it out.
Outside
Inspired by our love for Charity’s building a tree house song, we’ve been building tree houses with the pipes. We try to use all of the pipes and sometimes we build rocket ships as well to go to outer space. While some friends build with the pipes, other friends work together to build castles using the blocks, being extra careful so as not to knock down the creation. Our mud kitchen has also been really busy. We love making soups, muffins, cake, and ice-cream and inviting our friends over for a dessert party! We also enjoy riding on the swing by ourselves and with friends, sometimes going round and round until we get dizzy or going as high as possible to feel as if we’re flying.
October 29th- November 9th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
Fall is in the air! We had so much fun at Clancy’s Pumpkin Patch, that we decided to make our very own here at school. We first pick our baskets and then see what goodies we can fill it up with. There are so many different pumpkins and apples to choose from. We love the apple picking area, where we can match the different colored apples to each other. When we have finally picked our favorites we head to the register to checkout. However, this is a special pumpkin patch where we pay you to shop! We love giving out money to our friends. When it is closing time we like to rake up the leaves and stack the pumpkins, so it’s all ready for a new day.
Block Area
We love playing with the trains and train tracks. It is one of our favorite things to do. It is exciting to see how the tracks’ pattern varies from day to day. Some days we like to make loops, both big and small. Other days we want to see how long we can make it. There has been a few times where we even make it all the way to the tables! We use signs and stations to control the traffic because, boy, does it get busy, especially over the Golden Gate Bridge. We love working together to create many different tracks.
Quiet Area
When our bodies are not feeling quite as rambunctious, we find ourselves with a book in quiet area. Lately we have been feeling like finding a cozy spot on the couch by ourselves and reading on our own. We flip through the pages and find our favorite characters and pretend to be them. Sometimes we like reading with friends and talking about what is happening in the pictures. We even have a picnic sometimes to reenact story time at forest school. Some of our favorites have been: “Pete the Cat”, “Ten Apples up on Top”, and “The Little Engine that Could”.
Music Area
Our love for dancing to Charity’s music continues to grow. On days we miss Charity we have a dance party of our own and try to remember what we have learned in music class. When Charity does come we are so excited to show her we remember the words. With Thanksgiving around the corner, we have been talking a lot about what it means to be thankful. We went around the circle and all said one thing we were grateful for. Many friends said their mommies and daddies, and others said their toys, friends, and/or school. Right now our favorite songs to sing are: “The Grateful Song”, “PB&J” and “The Green Tree”.
Art Area
At Mano’s, we have been exploring painting with different mediums. Although painting with our hands is our all-time favorite, we had a lot of fun using foam rollers. We loved mixing the colors and seeing what different patterns we could make. We practiced sharing and team work as there were many of us painting on one large paper. Together we made quite the work of art! We now have them hanging in our school where we can enjoy them every day. We have also been practicing with stencils. It is hard sometimes, but we love seeing the end result.
Gross Motor Area
When our bodies have the wiggles we love to go to the mattress where we can jump and play with our friends. Its fun to see who can jump the furthest. We also love to do yoga poses to help with our balance and gross motor skills. We love the songs Teacher Jessie does because it helps us remember the poses better. We have been practicing “Swan”, “Airplane”, and “Bridge”. With the smoke keeping us inside, we were able to bring out a new toy. A huge tunnel! It was so much fun being able to crawl through and try to maneuver around friends.
Cognitive Area
The magna tiles continue to be a huge hit amongst our friends. We love working together to build towers that are taller than us, as well as different trains to move around the classroom, such as the N Judah and L Taraval. We also create laptops and pretend we’re working like our mommies and daddies. When we are not playing with the magna tiles, we enjoy using the magnetic sticks to move the ball through the maze board.
Outside
We officially have NEW GRASS! Though we loved playing with the tanbark, we have had so much fun running and rolling around in the grass and basking in the sun! We also love getting our hands dirty as we play in the mud kitchen now that we have real mud and not just bark! We love to cook up delicious food to serve to our customers. Some of the popular items in our kitchen are ice cream, cookies, cakes, and pumpkin soup. We were also really excited to take the pulp out of our school pumpkin and to show friends our Halloween costumes.
Although Halloween has just passed, we’ve been extremely excited about Christmas. We like taking the hula hoops and attaching them to various parts of the climbing structure, pretending as if we are decorating a Christmas tree or house with ornaments and lights. After having used the foam rollers at Mano’s, we’ve taken the rollers outside and pretended to paint our “house,” hoping to attract Santa Claus and his reindeers. Sometimes, we pretend to be Santa Claus and hand out presents to our friends. Other times, we engage in pretend play in which some friends are sick and visiting the doctor’s office. With our continued interest in trains, we work together with our friends to build trains, railroads, and tunnels. It’s always exciting to collaborate with our peers and work toward the same goal!
Forest School! (October 22nd-24th)
We had SO MUCH FUN in Forest School! While our backyard was being transformed, we set off into Golden Gate Park for some amazing adventures. We each got a special “adventure bag” to fill with anything we wanted to collect, and a little notebook and pen to take notes and draw pictures of anything we saw. We loved being able to search and find leaves, pine cones, and acorns, and take breaks together writing in our notebooks.
We paired up with buddies and explored together to discover lots of exciting places and pathways throughout the park. We pretended to go on “bear hunts” and spent a lot of time trying to find their caves and other hiding places. We learned a lot about the different plants and trees in the park as well as all the animals! We saw our raccoon family friends each day near the duck pond, lots of birds, bugs, and squirrels, and even a great blue heron! We worked together to build lots of different structures with all the fallen branches and bark we found and loved climbing around in all the trees- our imaginations went wild! Eating all our meals on the picnic blankets was a lot of fun and we were all really excited to get to sleep outside too!
Seeing the kids so engaged and joyful was amazing- we will definitely be doing forest school again soon! Enjoy all these pictures highlighting just a bit of all the fun.
October 9th-October 26th Happenings!
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!
September 17th- October 5th Happenings!
Dramatic Play
Wee-ooo! Wee-oo! In the past few weeks, our grocery store has transformed into a busy fire station! We firefighters have been working hard as a team to put out any fires or emergencies that occur. For each mission, we make sure we wear our fire-proof jackets and boots and bring our hoses and megaphones. So far, we have received calls to save houses, pizza parlors, schools that catch on fire as well as animals that cannot get down from high places. We have been successful each time!
Quiet Area
We have enjoyed reading books by ourselves and with our teachers and friends. Some of our favorites include “Firefighters A to Z,” “A Day at the Fire Station,” and the Piggy and Gerald series by Mo Williems.
Nature Area
We have been very interested in the microscopes and have been looking through them in hopes of being able to see objects in greater detail. Though we weren’t able to see the seashells through the microscope, we’ve viewed pumpkin seeds and blood. Much to our surprise, the pumpkin seeds and blood did not look anything like what we see with our naked eye! We have also had fun looking through the animal encyclopedia book and seeing all the different types of insects and ocean animals. One of the things we especially found intriguing was the page featuring images of bacteria and seeing what gets us sick sometimes.
Art/Literacy
At Mano’s, we have had lots of fun creating caterpillars of all different lengths, colors, and features by using pompoms, paint, and feathers. With Halloween coming up, we also decorated mini pumpkins, turning some into happy pumpkins and some into scary ones. Back at City Sprouts, we have been exploring with different colors and mediums to make doodles. We also had a blast using our fingers to piece together the “Magic Noodles” to make worms, caterpillars, shapes, letters, and swords. We enjoy trading our Magic Noodle creations with our friends.
Outside
In our time outside, we have created beds using the green mats and invited our friends over for a sleepover. Sometimes, we like to pretend the mats our tortillas and we wrap our friends inside to create yummy burritos. Another huge highlight of our outdoor play is Monster Friday! We love running away from daddy monsters and playing Hide and Go Seek. Friends have turned into monsters too! We also had an adventure to the fire station, where we saw fire trucks and fire engines. We even got to see the oxygen tanks and masks that firefighters use, as well as other equipment like saws. Our trip to the fire station has inspired a lot of our play. We like to connect the pipes together to pretend they are hoses as we spray away anything and everything that catches on fire and build a fire station using the blocks.
Music Area
In our recent music classes, we have really enjoyed scarf dancing and singing along with Teacher Charity. Some of our favorites are the mud song, jam jam jam, and the welcome song. We also like using the rhythm sticks to do movements as we sing along with Charity in the treehouse song. Don’t be surprised if you hear us chanting, “We need mud, mud, mud!”
Cognitive Area
We have been having lots of fun building airplanes, rockets, and cars with the bristle blocks. We like to take our creations with us around the classroom to show our peers. We also really like counting the fruit and opening the doors on the board to see what animal is hiding behind it and how many of them there are.
Gross Motor
With our energetic bodies, we love climbing up and down the ladder and sliding down to the mattress, where we jump up and down and pretend to be monkeys. We also love rolling around with our friends on the mattress too! Every Friday, we have been practicing different yoga poses, including frog pose, spider pose, airplane pose, tree pose, and boat pose. One of our favorite poses is the down-dog pose!
Block Area
We love placing blocks on our freight loaders and wheeling them up, being careful so as not to drop them! We also enjoy arranging the blocks next to each other to create roads that our toy cars can travel on, as well as using the blocks to create towers as tall as we can without them collapsing. When we’re not in the fire truck housed in the dramatic play area, we like driving the smaller fire trucks around and working together to save the dollhouse whenever it catches on fire. We are always sure to sound, “Wee-ooo, Wee-ooo, Wee-o,” when we’re on the way and we always make sure to stretch out the ladders on our trucks so that we can reach up high.