Art Classes with Marjon F. Aucoin

She's back!!!!  We have all been patiently waiting for art classes to start again, and the time has finally come!

Classes will resume on October 11th.  There will now be two levels of classes available to the students.

The Study of Art Class
Includes an introduction to various professional grade art materials.  Students will be free to explore drawing and painting skills.  Art history is also a very important part of the classes and is used in as many art lessons as possible.  Each student will present his final body of work at an art show at the end of the session.  He will also receive a portfolio to bring his artwork home at the end of the show.

Personal Series Class + The Study of Art Class
These classes are offered to students who have been in The Study of Art Class for at least two sessions.  They will be offered every Monday for six weeks.  In addition to the Study of Art Class, each child will also work on a two-piece series on canvas.  He will choose his preferred media: oil paint, acrylic, or water color.  He will learn what a "series" of paintings is and choose the subject matter and composition on both canvases so that the pieces work together as one unit.  He will then paint his two canvases using traditional painting techniques.  These pieces will be worked throughout the six-week class period and will require multiple layers of paint and more individual attention.  A greater emphasis on technique will be given in these classes.  Each student will present his final body of work at an art show at the end of the session.  He will also receive a portfolio to bring his artwork home at the end of the show.

Prices, Information, and Registration forms are located by the sign-in computer.  Marjon will be at Little Wonders on Thursday, September 30th from 3:00 - 6:00 for consultations and registration.

For more informaiton on Marjon's work you can visit her blog and website at

http://marjonart.com/home.html

http://marjonillustration.blogspot.com/

Little Bases Demo

Today the children had a demo with Little Bases for a demo of the class. 

This class will introduce the children to the fundamentals of baseball in a fun, interactive, yet noncompetitive environment!

They will learn skills such as hitting, catching, throwing, as well as developing hand-eye coordination.

The information and registration will be located by the sign in computer for anyone who is interested. 

  Classes will be on Fridays at 9:30

 Let us know if you have questions.

for more information, you can visit the website at
http://www.chipambresyouthsports.com/LittleBases.html

precise measuring

Everyday the children are taking steps to complete their costumes!We are really excited this year, because we the children are doing such a great job measuring and documenting.......Kiersten is a great teacher ;0)
Ashley has become very skillful in measuring for the costumes, so she has taken the leadership in helping the children measure out their costumes.  Each child is tracing themselves for their project, and we document our measurements on our own "chart" of our body! 

This is turning out to be a great tool in helping the children recognize numbers and understand measuring in inches.  It is also helping them understand to find the number 1 at the beginning of the measuring tape, put the 1 where we want to "start" measuring, and finding the number at the "end" of the measurement.

Parents, try doing similar activities with your child at home!  Feel free to ask us about the measurements your child has been working on in class so that you can follow up in your conversations and activities at home.

how do we turn on the light?????

Our house is well underway, but there is one problem........ it is too dark inside!

We started to think about how we could get some light in there, and the children wanted a light bulb. 

When we gave them the light bulb, they said they needed a battery......So...here they are!  But how do we make the light bulb turn on???  First thing we need to do is "make buttons to turn the lights on".  We each got a paper to draw what kind of button we needed....Some of us thought we needed square buttons, and some of us thought we needed rectangle buttons.  The children helped each other spell the name of the shape they drew.  We put them all on the table to pick the buttons ......and we put a blue button and a red button in the house!"Now you just need to "put the battery and the light together to make them turn on"Well the big battery didn't work, so now "we need a small battery"!  The small battery didn't help, so we thought, "hot gluing the small battery and the light together will make them work!" 

Hmmmmmmmm that didn't work either! 

Don't you just love our scientific thinkers?  They are doing such a great job of trying out different approaches to see how to make the light bulb work!  (little do they know the teachers have a science experiment to make it work just waiting for them in the classroom!)  Timing is everything with the children, we will do the experiment when the time is right to help the children learn and discover all they can while they are working on this project.  Stay tuned to see what other hypotheses our little geniuses come up with ;0)

our own version of project runway

Yes, Little Wonders PreK Class has their own runway show once a year, some of you are familiar with our Fall Festival Show.  The children design and create their own costumes every year, and strut their stuff for our friends and families to see for the opening of our festival!  Their sketches are already underway.......We are really big on measuring right now so we are incorporating lots of measuring as we design our costumes.  Take a look at some of our sketches.  We are drawing the front and the back and using measuring tape to estimate how much fabric we will need.  This is helping us recognize and practice writing our number and letters, familiarizing our self with inches, and helping us to make comparisons using terms like "longer", "shorter", " how wide", etc.

There is a list of the children and their choice of costume by the classrooms.  Please look at the list and have your child help you in choosing materials to bring to school to make his/her costume.  We have already started making them, so materials are welcome at any time.  A lot of children take trips to the fabric store with his/her parent, or some children bring in old clothes and "clean trash" that can be used to recycle and make costumes out of.  We love having things like old Cd's, cardboard, buttons, plastic bottles, Styrofoam, etc.  You are welcome to even take your child's sketch home with you to help you all decide what you should bring to school.  Please let any of your child's teachers know if you have any questions about this.  We are looking forward to it!!!!!

By the way.....the festival is scheduled for Friday, October 29th at 3:30 p.m.  Hope to see you there!

Quick Update

Remember our caterpillars?  Well look at the "piece" we are making now......All of the caterpillars, flowers, trees and butterflies are in one place together!  Ashley counted and said, "there are 5 caterpillars!"  So we all practiced writing the number 5!Some of the children are making a "house" out of cardboard, just like the one they built with legos!  We have really worked hard on the roof.  We had to make sure the whole roof was covered so that in case it rained, the water wouldn't leak into the house.....Nohea is good at always making lists of all of the things we need for our projects....Sam and Alexandre are working on making an airplane and the airport......Luke loves to make space ships!  Here is one of his creations.  He even spelled "space ship" and drew a picture of it!

Espanol!

We are excited to announce that Little Wonders has now teamed up with the Language Factory to incorporate Spanish into our curriculum!  We are coordinating with a Spanish teacher at the Language Factory to create a Spanish lesson once a week to coincide with our current projects!  She will teach them vocabulary, songs, and hold conversations with the children to help them learn Spanish. 
The exciting thing is that we will learn songs and Spanish vocabulary that has to do with the subjects we are learning.
Classes will begin tomorrow September 10th at 10:00 a.m., they will be held at Little Wonders.  This will be the only week that classes will be on Friday.  Beginning next week classes will be every Monday.

Handouts will be provided after the classes start.  If you have any questions feel free to ask Maryam.

lego land

when we are not working on the caterpillars, spiders, or sharks, we LOVE to use the legos....take a look at all of the things we are doing with the legos...

The children are so excited to see whose it the tallest.  We have started MEASURING! 

"How tall is Carter's?  How tall is Trevor's?"  "Whose is the tallest?  Whose is the shortest?"  "How many inches tall is yours?"

These are just some of the questions that we are asking the children to encourage them to measure and do math.  We are using the ruler to measure, we are making charts to write our measurements, and we are making comparisons.

We made this chart to show how high our legos are!

sometimes we draw what we want to make with the legos. We count how many of each color we need, and put the legos together just like our drawing. This has really helped us start doing some math problems. "How many more do we need?" "How many should we take away?" "How many blue legos are in your picture? How many red ones are in your picture?"

We practice writing the numbers, and it is helping us recognize them.

Who knew playing with legos could lead to all of this!