Six Year Class

Last week the six year class had the big job of making the chicken and gravy for the school Thanksgiving lunch! It was exciting to rub the chicken with the spices and see how it changed in the oven. We also made mashed potatoes and gravy. The children worked together with friends holding the pot while other children mashed. What good team work!

The kids are having fun with the songs we are learning in class such as John Denver’s “Country Road” and Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon.” We are learning some fun dances and songs to try on the pianica as well.

The six year class children are improving so much in their reading and writing skills. Every child practices reading at least two times a week with the teachers and we usually write one journal a week as well. We are learning so much in six year class and it is really starting to show! The teachers are very proud.

Six Year Class Teacher Kate

5 Year Class

Last Thursday The 5 Year Class had potato picking outside in the garden. Some of the potatoes they found were very big and others were tiny. The children worked hard to dig up potatoes that were large. They had to dig all around the sides of each potato until they reached the bottom because if they pulled too soon, the potato might break. We collected all of the potatoes in a bag and brought them back to our classroom. Then, we counted the potatoes together. The children dug up over 50 potatoes!

The next day the children used the potatoes in our snack cooking. They mashed up the potatoes and added some other ingredients before baking. Since we used a lot of the larger potatoes in our snack cooking, the children had smaller potatoes to take home. Even though the potatoes may have been small, they were still very special to the children. I saw the smaller potatoes in many of their lunches this week. They were excited to show their lunch to the teachers and to their friends! I could tell that potato picking was a very memorable time for the children in The 5 Year Class!

5 Year Class Teacher - Ms. Amy Penstein

4 Year Class

Welcome to the 4 year Class.

The 4 year class teachers have such a great class. They are all very curious and often have many questions. They enjoy singing and dancing. So the class uses music very often. We have Music class once a week but incorperate music into our morning and afternoon circles, as well as during transiton times.

This term the 4 year class has begun to learn letters from the alphabet. The children sing songs and create art with the theme of the letters we are working on. The songs we are learning are based on Jolly Phonics which uses sounds and actions to help the children remember the letter. The songs are familiar children tunes which are changed to focus on a letter sound. For example with the letter A to the tune of Skip to my Lou.

"A A Ants on my Arm
A A Ants on my Arm
A A Ants on my arm
they're causing me alarm"

While the children sing they move there fingers up their arms like ants are climbing up. As the children become more and more familiar with the sounds the actions can then be taken away. This gives the children confidence as they begin their journey into the world of reading and wrinting.


4 Year class teacher - Mr Jonathan Waltho

3 Year Class

The three year class teachers are so lucky to have such happy curious children to work and play with everyday! We laugh and joke and sing many songs through each day.

We just had our big Halloween celebration with the whole school and now we are training our young students to follow us like little ducks so we can walk to Acorn park together each week. This is a big step for 2 and 3 year old children, to go on a walk with a large group and follow teachers directions so we can cross streets safely.

We are currently collecting colorful Autumn leaves and natural artifacts to use to decorate our class and for art projects. Our class is very interested in nature from bugs and worms, to frogs and birds. We closely examine anything that gets near us! Our class has a collection of bug boxes that we use to gently capture crickets and even butterflies! When we are done looking at them, we then release the creatures back to nature, sometimes just a little further from our front door! Someone gave us two Cat-tails (gama) to decorate our room with, then one day they exploded into a million puffy dancing seeds! We put them into a large bug box so we could look at them. The children were so interested in what had happened and asked us many questions.

3 year class teacher, Mary