News & Events

Pre-School Monthlies - Sea Lions Room

Ms. Kelly & Ms. Courtney

April 2008

Hello Sea Lion Parents,

Since our last newsletter, spring has sprung.  The Sea Lions are getting ready to shed some layers, enjoy the warmer weather and longer days.  We are ready to observe all the changes spring brings.  We have welcomed spring by doing beautiful watercolor paintings and making fantastic spring flowers.  We were also excited to receive our painted lady caterpillars and our Sphinx moth cocoon.  We have carefully placed each in its own tank and observe them everyday.  When we received the caterpillars they were so small they were hard to see inside the jar, but each day they get bigger and bigger.  We can’t wait for them to get as big as they can and travel to the top of the container and form their chrysalises.  As for the Sphinx moth, he arrived already in his cocoon, so we are just waiting for him to emerge.  We are reading books on caterpillars and moths and learning the difference between cocoons and chrysalises.  In a few weeks, we will add a Praying Mantis to our science area and watch that transformation as well.   Spring is definitely in the air. 

The Sea lions were also excited for St. Patrick’s Day to arrive.  To get ready we read a lot of books about Ireland and leprechauns.  We again reviewed the words fiction and nonfiction.  For a science experiment, we took white carnations and placed them in water with green food coloring to see what would happen.  Each day we noticed that the carnations were drinking up the green water and slowly the petals turned green.  We observed the changes for more than a week and then took the now green carnations home.   To decorate the classroom, we painted shamrocks by using golf balls and glitter; they were beautiful.  We also painted rocks gold and created houses for the leprechauns.  When the houses were finished, we put small rocks, sticks and leaves in the houses to see if the leprechauns would take our offerings.  On St. Patrick’s Day we came to school and noticed the leprechauns turned our drinking water green, they took all the sticks and rocks from the houses and left us each Blarney bubbles and they turned our cream cheese green for snack, those tricky leprechauns.  We also noticed that the gold rocks were all gone, but when we went to our playground we found the gold hidden all over the place - we were very surprised!

We are almost finished with our letter of the week study. We’ve met the letters R (rope), S (stars), T (tape), U (umbrella) and V (vegetables).  We have really mastered long and short lines and big and small curves.  The sea lions enjoy thinking of words for our word wall and making the individual letters to take home.  We also enjoy all the activities we do and the books we read to help reinforce the letter sound.  We read books and listened for the rhyming words, we made stunning superhero capes, we’ve been playing class and small group games and taking turns and we are getting very good at class voting.  As we get near the end, the Sea Lions want to know what we will do after, only time will tell. 

The Sea lions were excited to finally go on our field trip to the Marin Recycling Center.  We have been learning a lot about recycling and we’ve been doing our own recycling project in class.  We could hardly wait to see the entire process in action.  When we arrived, we watched a very informative movie called “Kids Talking Trash”, which we really enjoyed.  We then got to put on orange vests and hard hats and walk around the inside of the facility.  We found it loud and a little stinky at times.  All 18 sea lions, Jackie, Rebecca and all the parent drivers got to stand on a huge scale - we weighted over 2700 pounds, wow!  We learned that plastic can be recycled once and that certain plastic play structures and fleece clothes items are made from recycled plastic.  We enjoyed going across the street and seeing all the pigs, turkeys, peacocks and chickens.  We learned a lot and had a lot of fun on our field trip.  We are having a lot of success with our class recycling project. To date we’ve raised over $45.00 and we just bought 3 - $15 gas cards for the participants of the Gilead House.  The Sea Lions are very proud of themselves to have raised this money.  We are going to continue to collect cans and plastic bottles in the classroom and will use the next series of money to buy something for the class.  Keep up the good work!

Now that the weather is warming up, we have been doing more activities outside.  We love using chalk and water to decorate the wall outside the classroom, we have been fishing in the water table and using eyedroppers to melt ice.  We had plastic animals frozen in huge blocks of ice and we figured out the fastest way to melt the ice and rescue the animals.  We decided that using warm water and putting salt on the ice was the fastest way to melt the ice.  We used a lot of teamwork and patience in this activity.

We look forward to what lies ahead.  Stay tuned!

Jackie and Rebecca



Thank yous:

Norm,  Rachel’s’ grandpa and Dave for reading us fantastic stories
Class donations
Cupcakes for Spencer’s 5th birthday
Parent driver’s for our field trip