Utopia Preschool

Our exciting shoe project will start on Monday , 3/28 . For our first class, please have your kids wear any footwear that they normally wear at home - slippers, slipper socks, flip flops, etc. Please do not buy anything new for this day. Don't forget to also bring regular shoes that can be worn for outside play. On Wednesday 3/30, please have your children wear their favorite footwear - boots, ballet shoes, sandals, etc. Bring regular shoes for outside play if their shoes are not appropriate for the outdoors. Please volunteer to be our visiting expert on shoes. Your kids will love to hear you speak to the class. The sign up sheet has already been posted. If you are wondering what these pictures represent, look closely again. Our students traced their feet on the concrete with chalk. Some even wrote their names and shoe sizes. Can you spot the size 10? Some kids also made face portraits using objects from nature. How creative! Other reminders: Our student-made Utopia di...

The highlight this week was certainly our trip to the San Francisco Symphony. The kids and parents loved hearing live orchestral music on such a grand acoustic stage. The theme of the musical experience is "telling stories through music." Image is from http://www.sfsymphony.org . Of course, everyone was thrilled to hear the grand finale - the music from John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack. Nostalgic parents and action-loving kids couldn't help but hum the familiar tune along with the Symphony. Image is from www.amazon.com . Upon returning to the classroom, we asked the kids to draw their favorite part of the field trip. Most of them chose the extremely adventurous (and safe) school bus ride. We are in the process of making a "Class Book," a small directory for this year's class. Each student will create his or her own page and add in some pieces of information. Stay dry! Spring is just around the corner.

Our Utopia gallery is now up on display. Though a number of students are still adding finishing touches, most of our kids are now published artists! The experience of creating one's self portrait was meant to teach the kids to follow a structured process. We all enjoyed brainstorming, planning, producing, and publishing our work. The students also had fun adding different colors and textured items to make their unique pictures come alive. The children used various materials in their portraits. This includes objects from nature such as acorn caps, pistachio shells, flower petals, and small leaves. We also utilized store bought materials such as yarn, beads, gems, and pipe cleaners. Our field trip to the San Francisco Symphony is this Monday, 3/14. Remember that this Friday, 3/18 is a school holiday. Enjoy the long weekend!

This week, our young Utopians focused entirely on themselves. Not in a selfish manner but for a creative art project. Our students made their very own self portraits. The kids drew the different parts of their faces which we put together at the end of the week. The nose was the last part of the face that was drawn. Our students learned to identify the parts of the nose - the bridge and the nostrils. Watch out for our new and improved gallery next week. We will decorate our space with our embellished portraits, which we will be the focus of next week's brainstorming sessions. The children also assembled intricate ramps. They tried rolling marbles, magnet balls, cars, unifix cubes, and practically anything they can think of. The different ramp models that they have come up with made the balls roll down, go up, turn left, turn right, and even jump. Without them knowing, they were learning about physics! Reminder: our field trip to the San Francisco Symphony will be Monday, Mar...

We hope that all of you are keeping warm during these last few nippy days. The teachers and students of Utopia are certainly feeling snug because our days are just packed! We have spent a lot of time at the gym this week. To get us warmed up, we exercised by sitting on rollers and bouncing on exercise balls. We also played the all-to--familiar games of duck-duck-goose and freeze dance. It is great that our school has such a nice facility for physical interaction. Our science focus this week dealt with the parts of the face. We got the children to notice the mouth and expressions of anger, happiness, and sadness. So the next time your kids are observing your lips, tongue, and teeth, it's because our curious little Utopians have been taking our classroom exercises back home. For Art, we used medicine droppers and paint to create colorful projects. The children practiced their fine motor skills by squeezing and releasing the doppers and medicine droppers. Visit our classroom t...

The days leading to Valentine week was filled with excitement. Parents, teachers and children were focused on getting the valentine treats (all 36!) sorted, taped, glued, and distributed. Aside from sharing sweet treats, the primary objective of the activity was to help the children practice writing their names multiple times. Thank you to Kari G, Charlie, Maria, Julia for celebrating the valentine week engaging the students with different activities. If you have not signed up to be our featured reader or Chef of the Week, please consider volunteering. It makes a lasting impression on your child when you come in and be the "teacher". This week the Utopians learned the process behind creating a piece of art. The objective was for the children to notice the eye and its different parts. Most of the time, we see dots or circles as eyes in children's art. We hope to move past that and make them come up with a realistic representation. The fist step was a brainstormin...

Last Friday when the school was closed, the teachers had a fruitful seminar with an educational therapist, Julia Harris, OTR. According to her teaching philosophy, "learning takes place as a result of all your senses working together." Here are two strategies that you can use to enhance your child's learning at home: 1) To improve your child's visual perception, encourage your child to build with blocks. 2) For touch and movement, encourage finger painting, shaping play dough, and fiddling with clay. This week we read the famous book by Eric Carle, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? Check the bulletin board for Utopia's very own version of the book. This is our third week into the Monday Journal , whose objective is to reinforce the students' sense of recall. The kids drew and attempted phonetic writing when remembering last weekend's activities. We engaged in a fun game of Shape Hunt in the classroom. Some children were extremely engaged in the ...

The Utopians had such an excellent treat for Chinese New Year. This week was all about celebrating the new cycle in our lunar calendar. First of all, we'd like to say a heartfelt xie xie to the Collier family (Scarlett's family) for preparing sumptuous noodles and bringing lucky round oranges to our classroom. They also arranged for the kids to experience a one-of-a-kind kinetic activity: The Lion Dance! Some of our students were able to get into vivid dragon costumes while Owen and Fiona took turns pounding the drums. The children had such an (educational) blast! Continuing our exploration of crystals, we actually saw our sugar crystals materialize! We discovered that boiling water and sugar simultaneously make crystals grow faster than simply dumping sugar into water that was already bubbling. To reinforce our math skills, we integrated our science lessons (crystals) with our number concepts (counting). Aside from counting and recording how many teaspoons of crystals ...

January has certainly been an eventful month for the students of Utopia. We ushered in the end of the month with a sweet surprise - making our very own sugar crystals! The procedure was simple. First, in a glass jar, we dissolved some white sugar into hot water. Then, we dipped a paperclip on a string into the sugary mixture. We tied the other end of the string to a pencil, which rested on top of the mouth of the jar. Though the kids were ultra curious, we had to leave the experiment undisturbed for a few minutes. As you can see, some groups even decided to color their sweet solutions. Some kids were able to see the colored sugar re-crystallizing on the paperclip. What an thrill! We plan to repeat the experiment next week. In the meantime, if you and your kids would like to do this at home, please don't hesitate to ask us for details. For Language Arts, we began identifying some common food and random items that begin with the letter "C". You can certainly try it...

Welcome 2011! As we start the New Year, we also welcome three new friends: Alessandro, Maia, and Santino to Utopia. If you see them or their parents at drop off or pick up, please introduce yourself. Crystals We came back from the break well rested and very interested to learn about crystals. We’ve done several experiments including growing crystals from a kit. The outcome wasn’t what we expected, but we’ll try again. Hopefully, we figured out where went wrong, and the next time will be a success. We were very fascinated with the effect of the ice cream salt rocks when placed on top of a huge block of ice. For a more dramatic effect, we added food color. We saw how the salt made the smooth surface of ice become rough really fast. We observed too that if we didn’t remove the salt, it made the spot where it laid melt faster. It was interesting to see how the salt “bore” holes into the ice. Crystals don’t only grow from store-bought kits. Nex...