Pet Week!

Dear Parents,

We brought our favorite stuffed animals to school this week for pet week!

On Tuesday, we had a discussion about the different needs of pets versus human beings. Some of the similarities that the children came up with were: Animals and people both need food, water, exercise, and friends.  The differences are: dogs and cats walk on four legs and people walk on two.  People talk and sing, dogs bark, and cats meow.

After circle time, we each created our own pet houses using coffee boxes.   The children painted their houses in red or blue paint.  On Wednesday, they added various types of animal stickers and added silk flowers, wood, or foam shapes for the roof.

On Thursday, the children made orange and black cats.  First they glued a head and a tail onto the cat's body.  They cut out triangles for the eyes and nose. They look absolutely adorable! 

In music, Ms. Lisa did a variety of fun activities with the children and their pets.  The children and their pets joined them to sing "Here I am" and the "Morning Song." They held up their pets high in the air when Ms. Lisa played high notes on her glockenspiel and they dropped them to the ground when she played the lower notes.  During our drum circle, the children marched with their pets to the beat of the drum and turned the opposite direction when she played the rhythm of Mississippi Stop Stop.  

Ms. Lisa wrote short songs to the tune of "Rain Rain Go Away" for each pet. While she played the song, the children tapped their knees from right, left, right, right left.  

Here are the lyrics:

Nolan- Nolan’s dog named rain, climbs into his house again

Maddie- Maddie’s Mr. Dog sits on a great big log

Neatai- Neatai has a sheep, it runs and jumps into a heap

Sanya- Peanut the penguin swims with Sanya once again

Charlotte- Charlotte’s bunny takes a dive just like it’s alive

Denise- Wally the Walrus loves to read to all of us

Daniel - Daniel’s polar bear he can flip in the air 

Bonne- Ms. Bs owl named Echo speaks, flying over mountain peaks 

Reva- Reva’s Sprinkles does some tricks, he rolls over, barks and flips

Ana- Elephant Eli, flies in the air as you can see

Lilia- Lilia has a bunny she somersaults so funny 

On Friday, Geddy (parrot) visited our classroom.  He sang, barked, laughed, meowed, said "peek-a-boo",  "come here" and  "Hello Geddy."  We also had a discussion about birds.  We learned that parrots come from the rain forest, where it is hot and humid.  We also talked about what birds eat. They mainly eat fruit, vegetables, seeds, and occasionally nuts.

Did you know, according to bird experts, some parrots have the reasoning skills of a three year old child?  I am not sure if this is true, but it only took Geddy two weeks to learn how to put a ball into a basketball net.  Geddy is twenty-six years old and is expected to live for another sixty five years.  

The children enjoyed watching Geddy so much that we decided to make our own parrots.  They look so adorable flying in our vestibule window.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Love,

Ms. Bonne & Ms. Denise