Our September opening this year has been unlike any other.  But despite the change in classroom locations, we are off to a relatively peaceful start.

Not all, but most of the tears at the door have subsided now, and the children are enjoying themselves as they begin to forge new friendships and also become reacquainted with each other.  While the move of some of our furniture as well as our educational materials from the basement to the upstairs was very challenging during the last hot and humid weeks of August,  all of us are settling in and working out the logistics of our new but temporary space.   It certainly helps that between all the teachers there is plenty of experience setting up classrooms, and as a group they are very flexible which is such an important part of the job.  PCUM has also been incredibly helpful, allowing us to disrupt their upstairs routine and giving us their rooms and areas of storage.  And we would like to thank you our parents for being so cooperative and supportive as we work out all of the kinks in an effort to keep things running smoothly.

Since for many of us summer vacation is a fairly recent memory, it seems appropriate to have Sea Life and Life at the Beach as our September themes.  The children are learning about the different kinds of shells…clam,  conch, slipper, tiger cowrie, spindle, moon, etc, and we have the actual shells on trays for the children to explore and handle.  If any child want to bring in shells to show, we would be happy to have them.  This week we will begin our study of sea animals including learning about the playful friendly dolphin, the shy octopus, the great white shark,  the singing humpback whale, the gentle, slow-moving manatee,  and quite a few others.   Books and  puzzles, songs and games are all reflective of these themes.

In Practical Life, spooning, grasping,  dry and wet pouring,  baby washing and tweezing exercises have been put on the shelves.  Also, shell digging has been brought out, and it is very popular.   The children dig out different shells they have learned about from a container of sand and match them. In a couple of weeks we will bring in our fishing exercise.  Using a little net, various little sea animals are fished out of a bowl of water, and matched on a towel.  Our Practical Life area fosters both large and small motor skills, a sense of order in a task, and an understanding of process.

In Sensorial, we have our magnetized fishing game on the shelf as well as the basic sensorial materials such as our pink tower, broad stair, cylinder blocks,  and color boxes.  The area of Sensorial enhances sensory discrimination, and for now the visual and tactical senses.  Later on we will be bringing in exercises that help refine the senses of smell, taste, and hearing. 

Because we are studying sea life, Language contains lots of sea life matching cards as well as objects, including the baskets of sea animals and shells.  In Math we will be counting and sorting fish and shells as well.  Also in Language we have brought in name tracing and picture story, where a youngster picks out an interesting picture, glues it onto a paper and then tells his or her teacher what they see in the picture while the teacher writes down their story. We have many Sea Life books on the shelves, both fiction and non fiction, and our art projects, as you have probably noticed, also reflect this month’s theme.

The refurbishing of our downstairs space has begun, a bit later than we had hoped, but progress is being made.  However, it appears as though we will be upstairs for the next few weeks, and our hope is to be back down in November.  Despite this period of change, we are excited because our newly refurbished space will look great, complete with fresh paint and brand new carpeting as well as some new furniture and equipment.   So while we never could have expected what happened, we are happy that it is all working out,  and that the children are fine.   When we do go back downstairs,  we may be enlisting your help with relocating our equipment and furniture….actually moving back down to our regular space.  It would in all likelihood be over a weekend.  We will keep you posted on how things are going. 

“I can’t change the direction

of the wind, but I can adjust my sails

to always reach my destination.”

       

                                                                           Jimmy Dean