The Bright-Eyed Bears Blog Spot: adios enero! Good bye January!

This week we bid good bye to January! We said adios enero! Hello February! hola febrero! It was a great month! Here are some of our highlights in pictures.

gasin' up the bikes

learning new tricks

lots of teamwork activities

welcoming special people into our classroom

Myla played her guitar for us!

We enjoyed a SNOW DAY....Florida style!

Florida snowman!

Shorecrest Circus! Aren't our tigers cute!

A lot of thought goes into building with the Bright-Eyed Bears.

AND SO MUCH MORE!!!

We spent a lot of fun time outside this past week. As we wrapped up our Author Study with books by Doreen Cronin, the children enjoyed story time in all sorts of "nooks" on the Shorecrest campus. We walked to the Faculty Garden outside of the theater to read one day and joined 7th grade reading buddies on the playground and in our own garden for story time on another. The whole class took a walk to the Shorecrest pond behind the baseball fields, and even ran on the track around the football field after spying all sorts of exciting birds and creatures. We had a Mystery Reader in the Library on Thursday...Myla's mommy! We even got to see a story come to life on the big stage when our very own Shorecrest 4th graders performed "We Haz Jazz!". What a treat! The children were singing the songs all day long after the show. On February 7th the children will skip rest time to go and see Aesop's Fables in the theatre. We love a good story!

looking for the turtle

Wow! Itty bitty minnows

Reading buddies are the best!

In class the children worked on numeral recognition of numbers to 30, and practiced counting with 1-1 correspondence. Each child learns differently and at his/her own pace. That is always taken into account during our center and classroom activities. Games like Number Bingo, Chutes and Ladders, Go Fish, Memory and more are great motivators for extra learning at home and also a lot of fun for the whole family! :)

Teacher picks me a number. I say what it is. Then I count out that many objects to paste on my paper.

The children have really been enjoying bookmaking activities and dictating stories. What's even more exciting is that many of them are beginning to sound out and print their own words for these stories. Mrs. Cummings and I are encouraging the children to print words phonetically in order to get them writing! No worries if the spelling is a little off....it's what they hear and they are learning! :) Printing on paper with stationery head and on white boards, chalkboards, easels, etc.with many different media is great for getting these little friends excited about reading and writing.

Isn't learning GREAT!

This week is a busy, busy one!
Monday and Tuesday we will focus on the letter Vv and activities will center around Valentine's Day.

On Wednesday, February 8th we will return to First Fruits Hydroponics to pick strawberries. First Fruits is the farm we visited in October. We saw many plants that were just sprouting flowers or had tiny fruit buds but there wasn't anything that was ready to be harvested back then. The boys and girls will now get to see the fully ripened fruit and we will bring some back to school for snack. We will leave school around 8:30 and will return around 9:45.