The Shape of Many Things

Although a few children generously offered  to let the teachers sleep on their sleeping bags while the kids wrote the blog, somehow it is the teachers blogging again today. And what a great day to blog! Today we made amazing pizzas. First we added the ingredients into Carol's bread maker which magically made it into dough. Katie's mom Michelle is a pizza expert and she helped us design the pizzas.

We took the dough and each child made their own little pizza with sauce, two kinds of cheese, olives, red onions and mushrooms. Just about everybody loved them!

Morning Meeting was puppeterific today! Carol and Tamara took up their puppetry skills, and acted out some very sad scenes about two puppets being unkind to a third puppet, who would throw herself on the floor and cry very dramatically. Luckily, the Turtles helped the puppets work out their problems at the Peace Table with lots of suggestions for solutions. Learning conflict resolution techniques is a big job for three and four year olds, and the Turtles are working hard on it!

There were also several shape games today. Carol showed the Turtles how to make different animals using shapes on the Smart Board, and then we went on a Shape March, looking for circles in the hallway. And finally, we read the book, Mouse Shapes. While children can typically recognize many shapes at this age, they are still learning the attributes of the shapes (numbers of sides, corners/angels, relationships between sides, etc).