Friday - November 13th, 2009

We are beginning to slowly wrap up our study of fall, leaves and the forest.

Today, we used guided imagery to imagine ourselves as small seedlings buried in the ground. We pushed through the ground to become small saplings.




When we moved into the world, we felt the sun on our faces and felt the cool air.


As the seasons changed, so did we! We grew stronger and stronger and eventually grew apples on our branches.

Along came some children. The children picked our apples and enjoyed the fruit. When that happened, we felt happy, because we knew that we would one day grow fruit again.

We had music with Ms. Shelley. We sang fall songs and pretended to be squirrels, scampering and gathering our nuts to nibble on.


We also explored the sounds that leaves make when they fall, and animals sounds that one might hear in a forest!




We also got to use special musical instruments (shakers).

In Creative Play, we put the tissue paper leaves we had made last Thursday on our forest trees. The trees are looking full now, and provide protection, shade and a home for us as we pretended to be squirrels and other forest creatures. We also made a birthday card for Orion.

In Atelier, we practiced our fine motor skills and further studied the shapes of leaves and what trees they represented by sewing burlap leaves with large needles and yarn.

We learned to thread our needles....

and make small stitches, pulling the thread all the way through.


We went up and down with our needles.

After rest time, we took the real leaves we sorted on Tuesday and organized them into a pictograph. We made observations such as how many leaves we had all together, how many more fir branches we had than maple leaves, if any amount was equal to another amount etc. We talked about the concepts of more than and less than, as well as discussed what the amount of leaves in our graph could tell us about how common certain trees are in our community.




We also celebrated Orion's birthday and had a dance party!