October 2014 Newsletter

Jam Session with Juliet, Sapaya & Chase

The days of Summer are behind us now, which will hopefully bring us some cooler weather. Not only has this muggy weather been keeping us toasty but all of our jam sessions have, too! Our new music teacher, Memi, is teaching us some new groovy songs. We are showing and sharing some fun things with our new friends and getting to know each other.  And we have a new student starting next month. We can't wait to welcome, Dylan, Claire's baby brother to our group.




Saparya and Mateo saying hello to a puppet turtle during Music Class

Important Dates to Remember:

• Oct. 13th - Closed for Columbus & Indigenous People's Day
• Oct. 22nd - Saparya's 2nd Birthday
• Oct. 27th - Kimberly's Birthday
• Oct. 29th - Monica's Birthday
• Oct. 31st - Halloween

Dandelion Puff Project:

We started out this project by stapling a pipe cleaner, our stem, to our paper. In the past we have come to find that it is extremely difficult to glue the pipe cleaners in place, so we secured them down for this project.

We then went ahead and made a small circle, with our glue brushes, at the very top of the pipe cleaners.

 



Then we placed a cotton ball, which would be the center of the dandelion puff, on the circle of glue.

 



 
 







We made a big circle with the glue around the cotton ball.

After the center of the dandelion puff was in place the real fun began! Using Q-tips cut in half, we made sure that the bottom of the sticks touched the cotton ball to make the dandelion seeds.

The results are beautiful!

 

Experimenting with Bubbles using water and oil:

 

                                                     Starting out with a dish full of oil..

                                        We used droppers to add food coloring into the dish..

                                                    The kids didn't know what to expect...

 

They realized the drops of food coloring made balls of color in the oil. We called them bubbles. This was a really fun experiment and the kids really enjoyed the fine motor activity of squeezing the bulb of the dropper to suck up the liquid in and then squeezing it again to shoot the liquid out; literally! They also had a bunch of fun poking the bubbles with the droppers until we had a big blob of color and no more bubbles.

 

 



 

 

Making Cookies with Shapes:

 

Sorry we didn't share! These cookies, or at least the dough, were make out of whole wheat flour and without all the sugar and vanilla flavoring. The Martha Stewart recipe was great for cookie cutters and baked really quickly. We did add some fun colorful edible confetti and sprinkles to them for color and more fine motor development. Take a look at how fun making the shapes were. We ran out of camera space once we were done cutting the shapes out but the sprinkles and such required all hands on deck! They did come out beautifully though ; )