Utopia Preschool

Today we had a special visitor in our classroom! Melissa read us Donovan's favorite book, The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Later on, she spent some time with the Butterfly Group outside! We love having our families visit the classroom! Thank you for spending your morning with us, Melissa.

In lieu of our yearly field trip to the pumpkin patch, we decided to create our own! Thanks to some generous donations from families, we were able to add hay, corn, leaves, and other fall decorations for the children to play with at school! The children pretended to feed animals in a petting zoo, and sold each other pumpkins at their "pumpkin store." We also compared sizes, colors, weight, and textures of each pumpkin, and counted how many we had. Thank you so much to the families who helped make our pumpkin patch a success! 

This week we celebrated reaching our fundraising goal by taking a walking field trip to the park down the street! The short 10 minute walk felt like an adventure! First we talked about how to be safe as we travelled to the park. Then we walked across a tall bridge, stepped on crunchy leaves, walked down the busy sidewalk, and observed cars, motorcycles and buses along the way. When we arrived at the park, the children had plenty of space to climb, run, spin, slide, and explore together. It was great to have a change of scenery and see the children in a different environment! We hope to visit the park again soon.                                          

This week I spent a moment in the Building Area observing a small group of children experimenting with ramps, tunnels and balls. Below are a few of the children's conversations with one another and with me.  Raegan: Look Teacher, I made stairs! Look this is where I roll the ball right here. At the top.  And then I put these blocks right here to stop the ball from rolling away!  Rian: The dinosaur catch the ball. Ball go down, dinosaur catch here. Stop!  Ynez: Watch this guys! My ball is the purple one. Make this higher here to make the ball go down fast!  Kara: Where my ball go? Oh! Arden, that's my ball. Pass the ball to me, please! Thank you!  From these little moments, we can observe that the children have different ways of interacting with the materials. They are learning to communicate with one another by sharing their ideas and asking for what they need. They also must share the materials with each other while being flexible if something isn't going t...