Fall 2016

Hi Blue Room Family and Friends,

The children are so excited about fall, starting PreK, our letter of the week, art, sharing and so much more! As the weather begins to change, our ocean work has mostly wrapped up and given way to excitement about all things autumn.


Our friends went on a nature walk around the school, collecting leaves to use to collage for letter L. We also used leaves to do leaf rubbings. The children got very creative and rubbed multiple colors just like they saw on the leaves.


L is for lady bugs, laying on a leaf. How many dots can you count?


The children used acorns that Evy and I picked from our yard at home to bring in and share with our class. All the children had a different technique of how they wanted to paint with the acorns.


L studying all the different parts of the pinecone.


D thought the bottom looked very neat and said that "this is where it connected to the tree."


P had a different technique


Painting pinecones was fun, but was challenging to paint each individual seed pod. The children's favorite part was sprinkling the glitter at the end!


A. working with clay and natural materials to make a bird. After watching the Happy Birds show, the children's interest in birds has been flying all over!


S showing off her bird named Rainbow. Rainbow's "favorite color is purple and her favorite activity is playing games. She's really funny and I like to hang out with my bird."


G and G making their nests for their clay birds.



Using yarn, moss, sticks, and leaves to make our nests.


Working in our journals, drawing things that start with the letter L.


M and A building blocks.


Our preschool group working on shapes, and realizing it takes a lot of patience and a steady hand to complete the pictures with the matching shapes.


Our PreK group doing their morning work sheet. It is amazing to watch their growth and see their fine motor skills getting better everyday. A highlight is when they get to make the letter of the week books, to color and use scissors to cut them out. They are so proud to read their books aloud!

Have a great weekend!

Hugs,

Kristina


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Diving into the Deep Ocean Blue

Hi Blue Room Family and Friends,

Over the past few months, the children have really been enjoying and engaged in learning about the ocean. The children have been able to pull knowledge from their own visits to the beach, going boating, visiting the aquarium, the fish tank in our classroom, books, and lets not forget Finding Dory.


We talked about about keeping our oceans clean and what happens when people litter. To demonstrate, we put magnets in our ocean and fished out all of the garbage with our magnetic fishing poles. This made space for the fish to swim and be happy!


This activity was a hit and the children were very proud when all the garbage was picked up.


L and G cleaning our ocean.


We read the book My Visit to the Aquarium and their imaginations were running wild, talking all about the kelp forest and scuba feedings. P and D working together in our deep sea sensory bin.


The children explored the cold open sea tank where fish have space to grow. It was filled with huge sharks, big whales, sea shells, dolphins, fishes, rocks and many other sea creatures.


C and S working on matching the fish to the correct color.


M working on matching the fish and also helping a friend.


P, A, and S working on counting dots on the fish and then finding the matching number.


After the children cleaned up the ocean, we put paper clips on the fish so that they could catch healthy fish with their magnetic fishing poles. A got really excited that she could catch more than one fish at a time!


Teacher Aimee read The Seahorse Song to us, and then we found the audio to the song online. It very quickly became a class favorite! Feel free to take home you child's project (it's in their take-home file) and read their personalized story which really brings their ocean to life. We used many different materials all worked into one masterpiece over a period of several days. The children were very proud of their hard work!


L working on step one - using oil pastels


S working on step two - water colors


G working on step 3 - rubbing and dabbing the water color


Friends working on step 4- ripping the tissue paper


D, S, and M concentrating on their seaweed


L and S working on step 5 - gluing their tissue as seaweed


L working on step 6 - coloring and cutting out seahorses


M working hard to stay in the lines


S working on the final step (and probably the favorite) - Glitter glue on the seahorses, and then after they dried, gluing them into their ocean scene.


Working math into our interest in ocean sea life. P and G measuring with unifix cubes. How long will each animal be?


L and L realized that the longest was the squid and the shortest was the crab.


Using our wooden shape blocks to build different sea animals


M and L felt inspired to make a big fish out of play dough, making all the scales and adding then to the fish.


Here's D working on his name with glue and sprinkling colored sand. This activity was neat on many levels, because their name with sand made the sea floor for our rainbow fish project that followed.


The other children loved watch one another to see what colors they would pick. You never know what you'll find on the ocean floor!


Hugs,

Teacher Kristina


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Family Involvement Volunteer Hours

Dear Creative Minds Families,

Welcome to a new school year! This blog post is to let you know of an important addition to our parent handbook this year—family involvement volunteer hours. (You also got a letter in your parent pocket with the same information.) Starting this year, we are asking each family to contribute eight hours per year. Many of you have already been volunteering from time to time, and we are so grateful for your help! We’ve found it to be a tremendous win-win whenever families have the opportunity to get more involved in our program. The children are proud of their parents’ contributions, the teachers appreciate the fresh perspectives and diverse talents you bring to the classroom, and our families feel more connected to each other and to the school. By adding this opportunity and expectation for everyone, our goal is to help every family find a meaningful way to engage with our school so we can all benefit from each other’s gifts and talents.

So how will this work? What do I need to do?

We are asking each family (regardless of how many children you have enrolled here) to contribute eight hours per year. That’s just a couple hours per quarter, and there will be a wide variety of ways you can contribute to our program, either here on campus or remotely. See our website at www.creativemindscdc.org/family-involvement/ for the most current project list at any given time. If there’s something else you’d like to contribute that isn’t on the list, we’re always open to ideas! Here are just a few samples from the list:

* Read a special book to the class and lead an art or sensory project related to it.

* Help with playground beautification or help build playground equipment.

* Help with housekeeping tasks: change broken blinds, replace light bulbs, etc.

* Make felt/flannel board stories to go with some of our favorite books.

* Serve on planning committees for recruitment/interviews or facility design

But I’m seriously SO busy!

We realize that many of our families are working full-time and don’t have a lot of extra time to commit. This is why we are asking only eight hours per year, and why we have a mix of short and long projects and some that you can do from home on your own time. Also, anyone from your family can contribute. Parents, step-parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, adult siblings—anyone who would like to share their talents is welcome.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call us at (408) 445-0101 or email Richa or Jennifer. We thank you for your understanding, and for partnering with us as we continue to grow and thrive together!

Thanks,

Richa Kapur

Director

Creative Minds CDC

Branham Park Field Trip

Hi Blue Room Family and Friends,



Enjoy pictures from our summer field trip to Branham Park.









Hugs,

Teacher Kristina


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Airplanes

Hi Blue Room Family and Friends,

Our class is starting to wrap up airplanes, we have enjoyed flying them all over. The children have created their very own flight school and runway to take off from.





Please stop in to see your child's model plane parked at the Blue Room Airport.




Hugs,

Teacher Kristina

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It's a Bird, it's a Plane...Its Superman!

Hi Blue Room Family and Friends,

Blue Room started to get interested in airplanes, from wanting to make paper airplanes. Many of the children every morning would ask Teacher Thaovy to make them an airplane. We noticed that soon there were paper airplanes flying all over our classroom, making it difficult to not be in the flight path. So we decided to create our very own Blue Room Flight School.








We also made blue prints of our airplanes before we made our 3D wooden models.














A couple words from P about our model airplanes -- "They made them how ever they want. One of the planes were tiny and it was Nico's plane. Someday when my plane gets painted it will look really nice. What if the planes try to take off now. I guess we'll have to glue my plane back together. It needs windows, wings, jet, and tail."

A couple words from K about what are we learning -- "About the runway, airplanes drive on the runway and when they get to the end they take off and go really high. We have been learning about how an airplane flies. Some have propellers and some have jets. The wings and tail help them steer."





A couple words from M -- "We made airplanes and tomorrow we are going to color them, we made them out of wood. Teacher Thaovy tried to fly an airplane it did not fly. The shape of the wings help them fly. We have been learning about lift - makes the airplane or jet go up, drag - means go backwards, thrust - means to go forward, and gravity - means to go down. We have been learning bout the runway too."

A couple words from G -- "The president flied on the Air Force 1 Plane. The Fighter Jet it fights the bad guys. It has bombs on the wings, also wants to have a Co-Pilot. The black airplane it goes at night, called the Nighthawk. They won't see it on the radar."

Please take time to ask your children about what they are learning. They have all been very interested about the topic and we are super excited to learn more.

Hugs,

Teacher Kristina

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