Walk in the Woods!

Happy Wednesday 4K Families!

We went on a special walk in our school forest today! We had a community member and one of our school's custodians, Mr. Kluth, help take us on a walk. He pointed out fun things for us to see along the way! We looked for the signs of fall. Some of the leaves are starting to turn colors on the trees! We even saw some trees that were bare and without leaves. Our friends were so excited they got to see some squirrels! Our morning friends saw the squirrel eating seeds from a pine cone. We also found a black walnut tree on our walk. Mr. Kluth opened up a walnut so the children could see what was inside. It was also exciting to find an apple tree!  In the morning, we found that someone had thrown a tire in our school pond.  How sad!  We fished it out of the pond and talked about taking good care of our environment.  In the afternoon, we discovered a group of friendly dragonflies that kept landing on us!  It was pretty neat!  We also practiced walking in a line for our big field trip tomorrow. We had a lot of fun outside on this beautiful day!

After our walk in the school forest, we had a special snack. We had an apple and juice. We talked about how there are different types of apples. We also talked about how apples can be yellow, red, or green. The children also learned about the different parts of an apple. A big thanks to all of you who donated apples for our special snack! 

We read the book Ten Apples Up On Top. This was a very silly book about some friends that wanted to see who could place the most apples on their heads. One by one they placed more and more until each of them had ten apples on their head!

After reading our stories, we did some work with numbers. We looked at an apple subitizing book. Subitizing means that the children can instantly identify a number of objects without counting, no matter how the objects are arranged. There were apples ranging from 0 to 3 on each page. The children had to look at the page and determine how many apples were on the page. We have some very sharp friends in 4K! This is an easy skill that you can work on at home. When you give your child any snack give them just a few and see if they can instantly tell you how many they have.

Today we had a special visitor. She is from Altrusa and read us a story. Our Altrusa readers will be coming into our classroom to read us a story 5 times throughout the school year. She even gave us a book to take home to read with our families. Please do not send these books back to school. They are for your child to keep at home to be placed in your child's own library. Our 4K friends were very excited to take their books home!

Our afternoon friend, Vince, shared some pictures of his new baby brother that was born last week. He was very excited to tell his friends at school about his new little brother!

Our morning friends had some extra time when they came back for their walk in the woods so they sang some songs together. They had fun doing some silly actions and dances to the songs.

Tomorrow our friends will be having book checkout. In order for your child to be able to pick out a new book, they must bring their big envelope with the book they picked out last week and their nursery rhyme booklet. Sadly, your child will not be able to pick out a new book if they do not have all of those materials. :(

There has been a slight change in plans regarding to when progress reports will be sent home. Rather than progress reports being send home today with your child, they will be going home next Tuesday, October 8th.

Please remember to dress your child in appropriate clothing for our field trip to Richmond's Apple Orchard tomorrow. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we have another beautiful day and the rain stays away! Thank you!

Have a wonderful day! :)