Argh Matey! and a Little Luck 'O the Irish!

We have spent the last 2 weeks turning our classroom into an adventurous pirate ship! We have been thoroughly enjoying going on a swashbuckling adventure to find treasure!

In our pirate ship we have:
-sides of the boat we painted
-a pirate flag with a Jolly Roger on it (skull and cross bones)
-a sail
-telescopes (made out of paper towel tubes)
-gold doubloons
-jewelry
-gems
-a treasure chest
-eye patches
-hooks
-hats

Though we have read stories about pirates that steal, we are nice, adventurous pirates when we play in class! We take care of our friends and we love to go on adventures together!

In the midst of our pirate fun this week, we also had an exciting visit from a little guy in a green suit!


We started talking about leprechauns and St. Patrick's Day this week. Many of us had stories about leprechauns coming to our houses and messing things up! We got so excited, we decided to come up with a way to trap a leprechaun, so we could get all of his gold! Ms. Stephanie was so proud of us! We (the PM class) came up with the idea for the trap all by ourselves! We got a bucket (that usually has our letter puppet in it) and propped it up with one of the wands from calendar. Then we got some gold jewelry from the treasure chest and put it underneath. We knew when the leprechaun came through in the middle of the night, he wouldn't be able to resist the jewelry and would knock the stick and get stuck!

Kind of like this (but not so fancy!):

When we came into class on Thursday and we couldn't believe what we saw! A leprechaun had messed up our room! Everything was crazy! Chairs were overturned, the calendar was all mixed up, there were shamrocks and leprechaun hair everywhere, the mailbox was on a tall shelf, and the milk was even green! Though naughty, he was obviously a nice leprechaun because he left us candy and glow in the dark bracelets! But the most surprising thing? There was something in our trap!

We all gathered around. Ms. Stephanie lifted up the bucket and we were supposed to grab the leprechaun....but he ran so fast....he got away! He flashed in front of our hours and we didn't even see him before he was out the door.

Unfortunately we didn't catch him, so we didn't get his gold. But we had a great day anyway!

Family Activity:
-One of the activities we did this week was go on a shamrock shape hunt. We found shamrocks in the hallway that had different shapes on them. Your job is to look around your house and write down and draw a picture of something you can find that matches these five shapes: circle, square, rectangle, triangle, and oval.

You can watch this YouTube video that has a song we sing in class about pirates!

Here you can see a slideshow of our pirate and St. Patrick's day photos from the last two weeks.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Farewell to the Ocean

We finished up our ocean unit this week. We are sad to say goodbye to the dolphins and fish, but excited to say hello to those pirates who are sailing in next week!

One of the activities we did this week was counting fish by color. We read the sentence "How many -red- fish are there?" and then counted all of the fish of that color. Once we knew how many fish were there, we picked out the matching numeral and clipped a clothespin onto it.

Here is a youtube flannel board color/counting fish activity. I encourage you to watch it with your child. You can count along with the fish.

You can learn how to count to 10 in sign language here:


Counting Activity


Family Activity
For your family activity this week, take a few minutes to watch this video of a huge fish tank with your child. Then you should ask your child to give you 10 sentences that describe something he/she saw in the video.

Examples:
I saw and orange and black fish swimming.
A yellow fish swam back and forth.
A big blue fish was my favorite.



Here are the pictures from the last 2 weeks of our ocean unit:

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Art Gallery Night

Thank you to all of the families who joined us at our Art Gallery Night hosted by TOTS.

It was a relaxing night where families explored the school looking at art created by our students, went on a scavenger hunt, got a tasty treat, and won a prize! It was also a great opportunity for families to mingle and the kids to see each other outside of school!

Check out our slideshow:

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Here are some other famous artists work:

Van Gogh

Mondrian

Monet


Jackson Pollock

You can click here to take you to a web page that will help you learn about other famous artists and see some of their paintings.