Group Meeting:  We are preparing for Valentines Day.  This week, the children will be decorating their mailboxes, making Valentines for the residents of Senior Star and learning a few new songs to sing.

Small Groups:  The activities for this week are listed below as well as the schedule for today.
Activity #1 (Yellow Group)  The children sorted candy hearts by color.  They counted how many they had of each color and printed the correct numeral on the recording paper that they are bringing home.
Activity #2  (Green Group)  The children dropped liquid watercolor onto color diffusing hearts.  As the color hits the paper, it spreads and mixes with other colors.  We will be taking these to Senior Star.
Activity #3 (Red Group)  The children decorated their Valentine mailboxes using a variety of decorations from the art area.

Story:  The story for the morning class was Stone Soup by Marcia Brown.  This is the story of three soldiers who are walking home from the war.  They are hungry and stop at a village.  The villagers are worried that the soldiers will eat all of their food, so they hide it.  The soldiers create a plan to get the villagers to share their food.  They will make stone soup.  Ask your child to tell you how making stone soup gets the villagers to share.
The story for the afternoon class was Will You Be My Valentine? by Steven Kroll.  This was the story for the morning class yesterday.  Thomas' class is getting ready for Valentine's Day.  He has selected Gretchen's name out of a hat and must make a Valentine for her.  He likes Gretchen, but Gretchen doesn't like him.  Ask your child to tell you how Thomas' mom helps Thomas and Gretchen become friends.

Large Group:  The children watched a video about how bread is made in a factory.  It was very interesting to see how the bread was made by the large machines.

Letter Learning:  We are going through the alphabet again.  This time, the order will be determined by letter name-letter sound relationship.  We will begin with consonant letters that have a letter sound at the beginning of the name (b, d, j, k, p, t, v, s), then consonant letters that have the sound at the end of the letter name (f, l, m, n, r, x), then consonants with no letter/sound association (h, q, w, y), and those with more than one sound (c,g, s, a, e, i, o, u).    The morning class did Bb yesterday and Dd today.  Because of the early dismissal yesterday, the afternoon class did Bb today.  We will catch up soon!

Snacks:  The morning class had Goldfish and juice brought by Jade.  The afternoon class had granola bars and juice brought by Grace K.  Thank you, Jade and Grace!