Arnold Open House will be on Monday August 10th from 6:00-7:00 P.M.

The first day for preschool students is August 17th.

I’m excited to meet you all!

This week we have been learning all about apples! We have read lots of apples books, we learned two new apple songs [5 Little Apples Hanging in a Tree & A-P-P-L-E (to the tune of BINGO)], and we turned our house area into an apple orchard!

Here is a picture of our apple stand where we can buy apples!

Here’s one of our apple trees where we can pick apples!

We also had lots of fun on Thursday playing with Apple Pie Soap Foam. We made the soap foam using a few drops of Dawn dish detergent, a 1/2 cup of water, and some apple pie spice. We mixed them all together in a mixer and it made the soap into a foam similar to shaving cream.  Our room smelled wonderful! 🙂 We had lots of fun playing with it with cups, spoons, and pie plates! Students were making apple cider, apple pie, apple sauce, and lot of big bubbles!

This week we turned the house area in a football stadium! Since we live in Nebraska we specifically made it into Memorial Stadium so we can pretend to be Husker Cheerleaders, football players, and coaches. 🙂 We’ve gotten to hear lots of “GO BIG RED!!” chants throughout our worktime!

On our bulletin board we have posted football vocabulary words; pictures of cheerleaders, football players, and the stadium; a posted football schedule; and the posted menu items and prices for our concession stand.  We changed all the food items in our play fridge to be the items listed on the concession stand menu.

Here’s the pictures of our football and cheer-leading “lockers”.

Here is our concession stand where students can buy pop, pizza, Runzas, hotdogs, and popcorn. The students have had lots of fun opening or closing the concession stand, buying food, and working as the concession stand employees.

This is my favorite part of our concession stand this year! I found the popcorn containers at Dollar Tree and have had the yellow sponge circles for years just sitting in my cupboard! They make a perfect pretend popcorn with lots of extra butter! 🙂

This week at school we read many versions of the book Jack & The Beanstalk. I choose to read this fairy tale this week because at outside time the students have been pretending that one of our ladders on the playground is a beanstalk. The students have been taking turns being “Jack” or the giant. If you are Jack you go up the beanstalk ladder and then whomever is the giant chases “Jack” all around the playground.

Here are some of the versions of the story we read this week:

Jack & The Bean Stalk by Richard Walker

Kate and the Beanstalk by Mary Pope Osborne

Waynetta and the Cornstalk: A Texas Fairy Tale

Paco and the Giant Chile Plant

As we read each version we talked about how they were similar and how they were different. Each story had a giant plant, a giant who lived at the top of the plant, and some sort of magic seed.

On Friday we also planted our own “magic beans” in wet cotton ball “clouds”. We hung them in our window and will see what happens to them when we come back to school on Monday!

I love seeing pictures of other people’s classrooms to get ideas of what I can do in my own room, so I thought I’d share a few of my own photos of my classroom this year. I teach preschool at a local elementary school. Our preschool program is unique in that two certified teachers share a classroom and each teach half a day meaning that all areas of the room have to be shared by two groups of teachers and two groups of students. In our room the morning teacher puts all of her things for her class on blue and I put all of mine on red. We use black, white, and gray for all of the items we both share in our room.

We only have one large bulletin board in our room, so we divide it in half for each class to use. We bought matching blue and red fabric to cover our boards. I typically create a timeline of our learning and hang up pictures of the students under each months header.

These are our cubbies and art boards. Again the morning classes names and letterlink symbols are on the blue paper and my classes names and letter links are on the red. We hang their artboards to display their artwork above their cubbies.

This year we refined our “daily objectives” board. The left half is for the morning teacher and the right half is my PM group. Each day we will display a photo picture of what we are doing at Large and Small group times (i.e. singing, alphabet, food experiences, etc.) for our preschoolers/non-readers to be able to see what we will be learning about. We will also be writing our objective for learning next to the pictures for adults who enter our room to know what we are learning about more specifically each day. The bottom six boxes are for each of the areas in our room (art, block, book, house, toy, & sand/water) that we will place pictures of what is new in each area for the week.  I created the daily objectives board on 1/3 of the whiteboard in our classroom. I used vinyl letters cut from a crickit to make that Today We Are Learning… so I don’t have to rewrite it each day 🙂 I used washi tape bought on Etsy.com to make the borders as it comes off easily without leaving sticky residue and then typed up the schedule times using the pictures from our daily schedule.

This is our daily schedule board. We wrapped a foam board in black polka dot fabric and attached velcro on it for our schedule. This allows both the morning and afternoon class to use the same schedule board by simply taking off the pictures and arranging them in the correct order for the current class of students. We keep our schedule on the whiteboard using a magnetic shelf bought at Lakeshore Learning. We didn’t like the blue color of the shelf so we washi taped it with the same tape from the daily objective board to make everything match.

We only have a few bulletin boards in our room so we share this one for our family photos. We put up stock family photos purchased from Lakeshore to start the year and then add in our own students family photos as the year goes on. This year we added the words for family in some of the languages that our students speak (our district has 57 languages!). I LOVE how it looks!

This is our cupboards that we have in our room. We use the fabric bins for storing teaching materials in that we access daily and for organizing our small group materials. The morning classes have blue bins and the afternoon class has red bins.

This is one of my favorite areas in my room! Our color wall hangs in our art area and features vinyl wall decals from the story Brown Bear Brown Bear. We have the color words for each animal written around it to represent the 4 most common languages spoken in our classrooms (English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian). I am hoping to add new words this year as I have some new home languages represented in my class this year. One of my students moms a few years ago made my Arabic words for me! I love it and my students reference this wall a lot and enjoy learning how to write words in the home languages of their friends! 🙂

Arnold Open House will be on Thursday, August 7th from 6:00-7:00 P.M.