Mother’s Day Tea
Our class is hosting a tea to celebrate Mother’s Day.
They will try their very best every way
To show you how special you are that day!
So please come have a cup of tea to say Thank you
For all the things that you’ve done, and wishes that the day
Will bring you happiness and fun!
Hostesses:
Mrs. Stojanik & Ms. Lane’s Class
When:
Friday, May 11th 9:15-10:00AM
Where:
St. Matthew’s Day School, Classroom # 7
Animal Homes Unit
Road Rally 2012
This week we will begin our Unit on Transportation! We will focus on the different modes of transportation for water, air and land travel. We will touch on different modes of transportation in other parts of the world and other cultures. The children will talk about their own experiences with travel. Our class will review car safety
guidelines and traffic signal signs and rules.
Color: Purple
Shape: Octagon
Number: One to one correspondence for 1-8
We will finish our unit after spring break with a Road Rally on Friday, March 30th! Mrs. Carothers’ class will join our class for this exciting day. You will bring your child’s big wheel, scooter or tricycle to school on this day, along with their helmet and deliver them in the back parking lot at the fire lane, where a teacher will be to tag their vehicle with its owners name.
During play time, we will have the children participate in a parade. They will practice parking their vehicle and learn about traffic safety and traffic signs.
Ms. Lane and I are looking forward to a marvelous March with your children!
Spring Break-March 12th-16th
Friday, March 30th-Road Rally!
Saturday, March 31st-Day of Service
Our class talked about being an artist and all that being an artist encompasses. We also talked about and looked at many different artistic mediums. The children were able to give us examples of art we see around Austin.
We looked at our feature artist, Paul Cezanne and talked about two of his watercolor paintings: Self-portrait and Still Life with a Watermelon and Pomegranates. The children then all created their own watercolor masterpieces on our special watercolor paper!
Tomorrow, we will put on our chef hats and bake individual pizzas! Each child will roll out the pizza dough, spread on pizza sauce and sprinkle some cheese on their pizza. Ms. Lane and I will be cooking them of course! We will talk about how matter changes when it is heated to tie our cooking into our science.
On Friday, if your child would like, they may come dressed as their favorite occupation or community helper. Please do not go buy anything. It could be as simple as putting a sign on your child or even having them bring something that represents their chosen profession.
Spring Break March 12th-16th.
Family Day of Service Saturday, March 31st.
We have all had so much fun learning about the Winter season! We each had our own calendar and we talked about the New Year, 2012! We also talked about the new month of January and sang a song to learn the days of the week. The children also pointed to the number days and counted to 20 on Friday! The children loved painting with ice and liquid watercolor and created beautiful pictures! We talked about the the forms of water (solid, liquid and gas) and watched our ice melt into another form (water). The children were able to dress up in their winter clothes and have even become more proficient in donning their own winter coats and hats! We are still trying to grow our crystals that will continue to be out on the table in our Wed, Fri room.
Our class is gearing up to begin our new unit: Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales on Wednesday. With this unit we will continue to work on our counting and number recognition, rhyming words, writing our name (the HWWOT style), sorting and patterning.
Color: Brown
Number: 6
Shape: Rectangle
During this unit, we will spend time dressing up in our favorite costumes and use our wonderful imagination to create our own tales of princes, princesses, fairies, kings and dragons!
The concepts we will be working on are: real versus pretend (fantasy), rhyming words, lessons learned by asking for too much (magic fish), beginning, middle and end to stories. We will also introduce characters, setting and much more.
We will talk about the components of a fairy tale, introducing characters (hero versus villain and creatures acting human), how a fairy tale begins with “Once Upon a time” and ends with a fairy tale happy ending. We will even construct our own class fairy tale with twists and turns in the plot that I am sure will be very interesting!
Here are some of the Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales that we will be reading in no particular order: Magic Fish, Stone Soup, Gingerbread boy vs. Clay Boy, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Lon Po Po ( Little Red Riding Hood) a story from China and the French version, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.
Depending on time we may cover these as well: Humpty Dumpty, Three Little Pigs, Hey Diddle Diddle, Three Little Wolves, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Miss Muffet, Jack and Jill, Hey Diddle Diddle, This Little Piggy, Silly Sally, Hello House, The Three Bears, Abiyoyo (adapted from an old South African folktale)
Upcoming Reminders:
A reminder that Donuts for Dads will be Wednesday, February 1st at 8:30am, in our room. Dads will come to our room and then they are welcome to join us at Chapel afterwards. Chapel goes from 9:05-9:30.
We will celebrate “RED DAY” which is similar to Orange Day on Monday, February 13th. The children will wear red to school!
Monday, February 6th will be a faculty meeting at 1:15 (NO ANGEL PLAYDATE).
Monday, February 20th is Presidents Day and there will be NO SCHOOL.
We are so excited to see each one of your children back at school and can not wait to hear all about their Christmas break!
The next two weeks we will be learning about:
Unit: Winter
Color: White
Shape: Star
Number: 5
Science: Crystal Growing
Winter animals: where they live and how they adapt to the cold weather.
Math: Number counting and recognition 0-5
The week of the 23rd, we will begin our new unit on Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales.
Reminders for January:
1/9/12 School Resumes
1/10/12 Staff Meeting
1/16/12 MLK/ NO SCHOOL
1/17/12 Happy Birthday Livia!!
1/20/12 Fire Drill at 10:00am
1/23/12 New Unit: Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales begins
Christmas Pageant MWF 3's
“Christmas Unit”
It is hard to believe that Christmas is around the corner but we are beginning our Christmas Unit. For this unit, we will be focusing on exploring the roles each person in the birth story has in Jesus’ life, we will discuss the similarities and differences among holiday traditions today and when Jesus was born; talk about ways to prepare ourselves for the birth of Jesus. We will be doing finger plays and using puppets to act out the story of the nativity.
We will send home a page for you to fill out about your special family traditions and create a class book out of it. Your family traditions can be anything from travel, driving around to look at holiday lights to going to church, etc. You may attach pictures or have your child draw pictures relating to your tradition. Please return them by next week.
We will end our unit with a Christmas Party (more details to come for the party parents) and our special pageant.
Unit: Christmas
Color: Green
Numbers: 4 & 5 (Reviewing numbers 1-5)
Science: Seasons, winter weather.
“We Are Thankful Unit”
Mrs. Stojanik’s MWF 3′s Thanksgiving Feast!
We have had so much fun learning about apples! We looked inside an apple, counted the seeds, tasted a variety of apples and graphed our favorite tasting apple. We also made apple prints from our favorite tasting apple. We put all of our apple projects into our apple book with a little story about Johnny Appleseed (who’s real name is John Chapman). We will be spending the next few weeks on the theme: We Are Thankful.
“Bats and Spiders Unit”
We are getting ready to begin our unit on bats and spiders. We will be busy counting body parts, legs and eyes! We will compare our hands to bat wings and think about how they are the same and how they are different.
Mrs. Loftin and I built a bat cave using some black fabric and our big blocks to make cozy caves for the bats to hide in. We will practice counting and sorting as well as patterning with pumpkins, bats and spiders.
For our science, we will be investigating what’s inside of bat caves and pumpkins.
Number: 3
Shape: Diamond
Color: Black and Orange
After bats and spiders, we will move on to pumpkins and discuss the sizes of small, medium and large. This will segue into our Fall fun unit and we will talk about color change, harvest time and taste test a variety of apples. We will spend the majority of November on the unit: ‘We are Thankful’ and end the unit with a special Thanksgiving Feast on Monday, November 21st.
We are looking forward to all the fun holiday’s ahead and cool weather!!
“Fire Safety Unit”
We learned a lot with our Fire Safety Unit. Some of the main points that we reviewed with the children after the fire fighters talked were:
In case of a fire:
Don’t be afraid of fire fighters, they are here to help us stay safe.
Stay low and go.
To put out a fire on your body, STOP, DROP and ROLL.
Once your outside, do not go back inside.
We also discussed coming up with a ‘family safe meeting place’ in the case of an emergency. Please review this with your child for homework and they will report back to us where their ‘safe meeting place’ is outside their home.
The children also enjoyed creating their shape fire truck, fire-marble art (used red, orange and yellow to represent fire) and we even did a fire related experiment with a candle and two different cup sizes. First, we talked about if we ever find matches or lighters that the children need to hand them to an adult, so that they stay safe. Next, I lit the candle and placed a small cup over the flame. The candle’s flame eventually went out. Then I put a larger cup over the flame, after relighting it and again the flame extinguished but it took longer than before. The reason it took the flame longer to go out was because fire needs air to continue burning. The larger cup has more air inside and so the candle’s flame lasted longer. We had a few great educated guesses with this experiment!
Unit: Fire Safety
Shape: Square
Color: Red
Number: 2
“Fire Safety Unit”
Tomorrow we are beginning our mini-unit on “Fire Safety”. In honor of Fire Safety, we will be having a fire truck visit us as well as the firefighters to talk about how we can be ‘safe.’ The children will have a chance to sit in a real fire truck tomorrow!
This past week for our ‘Farm’ unit the children made a barn out of shapes and we worked on identifying the different shapes, listening to two-step directions and working on spatial skills. We used the words: above, below and next to, in relation to the barn and where they were to glue their farm animals. These positional words are great to use when doing activities like setting the table, asking for your child to help you clean up etc.
The children each planted their own lima bean and we are patiently waiting for them to sprout! We will send them home this week, so continue to water them and put them in the sun and watch them grow! We enjoyed looking at different vegetables, learning their names and making prints with them. We also looked at a carrot that still had it’s roots and learned the different parts of a vegetable plant and what these parts do for the plant.
We finished up our ‘Farm Unit’ by enjoying a planted flower treat made by the children! They scooped up chocolate pudding and carefully put it into a cup. Next, they put a straw in the middle of the pudding and placed a flower in the straw. They crushed up Oreo cookies in a baggy with their fist and poured it over the pudding and lastly, added a gummy worm to aerate their soil!
Unit: Fire Safety
Shape: Square
Color: Red
Number: 2
“Farm Unit”
Howdy!
This week we will begin our unit on Farm! We will end this week with a visit from Fry’s Fun Farm on Friday at 9:10am. They will be bringing a petting zoo to the school for the 3′s classes to visit. We will begin learning about Farm by reviewing our prior knowledge of what a farm is and who and what animals live on a farm. Our first art activity for this unit will be painting a pig by using circles for the head and body to reinforce our last shape we learned.
We are sad to say goodbye to our first unit, “All About Me!” We have been busy these past few weeks and had a lot of fun learning about our feelings, five senses and sound and music.
Our class read the book, ‘When Sophie Gets Angry-Really, Really Angry…’ by Molly Bang and then discussed our feelings and emotions and the choices we can make when we feel angry to help ourselves feel better and calm down. We even identified and modeled different types of feelings and enjoyed looking in a mirror as we changed our faces to mimic the feeling card we chose during circle time. The class finished talking about feelings by graphing, ‘How are you feeling today?’ and creating ‘smash art’ by placing drops of paint in between folded paper and smashing down the paper to create a design.
We read ‘My Five Senses’ by Aliki: talked about our five senses and how they help us take in information about the world around us. As a follow up activity the children identified noises that were played on the CD player (thunder, traffic, rain, fan) to represent hearing. For sight and taste the children had three white food items that they had to decide if they tasted salty (salt), sugary (sugar) or flavorless (flour). The children had a harder time deciphering between salt and sugar because there texture is so similar. Next, we moved over to our smelly jars and matched the smell in the jar to picture cards they matched. Then for our art activity, we created ‘My Touch Book’ and the children matched the object they glued on the book to smooth, bumpy, rough, soft. They did a great job identifying how the object felt!
The last part of the week we talked about sound and music and sharpened our listening skills by identifying if our tempo was fast (allegro) or slow (adagio) as we played various musical instruments. We then created maracas out of plastic bottles with colored masking tape.
Our class read the book ‘The Listening Walk’ by Paul Showers and illustrated by Aliki. It is a wonderful book that reminds us to tune into our sense of hearing and become more aware of the sounds around us. We encouraged the children to close their eyes to see if they could ‘tune in’ to the sounds around them in the classroom before we left for the walk. They heard seven different sounds in the classroom! We then went on a class ‘listening walk’ and used all of our senses (except for taste) 
to take in our surroundings. We heard the air conditioner turn on and off; teachers and children playing on the playground, we saw a bird flying around, touched an object that we found interesting on our walk and even smelled barbecue cooking next door!
Unit: Farm
Shape: Square
Color: Red
Number: 2
“All About Me Unit cont…”
Your children have all done so well this past week! Ms. Lane and I have been so excited to see the benefit of using conscious discipline in the morning greetings and throughout our day in the classroom! Our class rules were introduced last week, they consist of two sentences that we will review often with the children: Our job is to keep you safe, Your job is to help keep it safe. What does it mean to ‘keep it safe?’ It means to keep ourselves, others and our classroom toys safe.
We were busy last week creating our ‘All About Me’ pages that you will see in the hallway as well as our family thumb print pictures. While creating these masterpieces, we talked about how no two families or people are alike and that is what makes us so special! The children worked hard cutting along a line and also drawing a circle for our shape page. For our shape page, we are teaching your children to begin their circle at the top (just as they will their letters and numbers in the 4′s). They begin with a ‘magic c’ and follow it around to the top to complete the circle. We have also been singing our Mat Man song that talks about our body parts and what they do for us. For example: “Mat Man has one nose, so that he can smell.” This is a fun way to learn “All About Me!” We began our circle time with a Hello song that introduces each child and their name to help the children learn their new friends names. It would be very helpful to review our friends while at home with our Class Photo’s that I sent home last week.
The children did a great job at Chapel practice last Wednesday. We found our seats (middle section, facing the alter, on the left front two pews). They learned how to put the kneeler up and down with two hands safely. Lastly, they learned that the books beside us have no pictures, just words, so they stay put. We are excited to go again this coming Wednesday, and the children will need to be in the classroom by 9:05 for us to walk to the Chapel together. Parents are always welcome to attend Chapel with us anytime!
This week, we will begin learning about feelings and emotions. We will discuss what emotions may look like, what we may be feeling and how we can calm our body by going to our ‘safe place’ area in our room and choosing a breathing icon if we feel upset or angry. These breathing techniques can be done anywhere but sometimes we need a quiet place to go when we are sad or upset. The ‘safe place’ is a safe environment for a child that can give them tools and comforts to calm themselves down.
We are looking forward to a sensational second week!
Unit: All About Me
Shape: Circle
Color: Yellow
Numbers: 0, 1
“All About Me Unit”
I am sure your little ones are tired from their day of exploring their new classroom, getting to know new friends and learning our class routine.
We began our morning having the children “check in” on our ‘Who’s Here Today’ chart.
They enjoyed learning our four breathing symbols/ techniques from conscious discipline: S.T.A.R. (stop, take a deep breath and relax), balloon, drain and pretzel. We sang a body awareness song while pointing to our body parts and learning why they are important to us. Lastly, we introduced our shape, color and number (circle, yellow, 1) for the unit, ‘All About Me.’
The children enjoyed listening to “The Kissing Hand” and our raccoon puppet read the part of Chester Raccoon. The children then ran to find their Mommy’s and Daddy’s pictures around the room.
Remember as a follow up to this book to kiss your child’s hand as you see them off to school on Wednesday. You will see all of our hands in the ‘I Love You’ position for sign language up on the left side of the bulletin board in our Wed, Fri room.
We will continue to learn all our friends names, our class routines, conscious discipline (songs, rituals and connecting activities) for quite a while. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions regarding any of this! I encourage you to browse the conscious discipline website and print resources for use at home to make this more seamless from school to home. The web address is: www.consciousdiscipline.com
We had such a wonderful first day back with your children! Thank you all for helping make your child’s first day a success by helping them transition into the room with confidence! Children are so good at reading our hesitation in situations but they were all ready to join us today. Wed, Fri can be more difficult for them, so hopefully their smooth transition continues!
Unit: All About Me
Shape: Circle
Color: Yellow
Numbers: 0, 1
Welcome to Mrs. Stojanik and Ms. Lane’s MWF 3′s class!
We are holding an “Orientation Day” on Friday, August 26th. The girls’ classroom visit will be from 9:30-10:15 AM and the boys’ visit will be 10:30-11:15 AM. We will meet in classroom 7. We are looking forward to meeting everyone!
*OUR MONDAY CLASS WILL MEET IN ROOM: B (IN THE BREEZEWAY).
WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY WILL REMAIN IN ROOM: 7 (IN THE MAIN HALLWAY).
See you all soon!
Christiana and Jill
