June 2017

We have learned so much about Hawaii and the Ocean over the month of May! The children learned a few new Hawaiian words, practiced dancing hula, made leis, and sang Hawaiian themed songs. As always, our theme was carried out through the classroom including in our books, puzzles, art shelf supplies, and practical life works.

One of our most popular songs during circle time was “Coconut Soap” by Frank Leto. This was one of Ms. Jamey’s favorite songs while growing up in Hawaii. This song helps the toddlers learn different parts of their bodies while pretending to wash with coconut soap. During circle time we also learned a few words such as aloha (hello, goodbye, I love you), mahalo (thank you), maka (eyes), and piko (belly button).

The toddlers enjoyed using our water table and the shell washing work. This month in our water table we had pretend fish with different fishing nets and containers allowing them to “catch” the fish. The shell washing work included many steps and was a big work on our practical life shelf. The toddlers practiced scrubbing the shell with water and a sponge, wiped the shell dry with a small towel, and then folded the towel to put back on their tray. We hope you enjoyed the video on Bloomz of a child using this work!

We had various language matching work including shell matching and sea animal matching. The children matched a real shell to a picture of a shell and matched small sea animals together. We had an ocean book on our shelf with matching animals to each page as well. These works allowed us to practice the names of the different animals and what sounds some of them made.
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Over the month of June we will be learning about insects, enjoy time outside, and introduce bigger works into our classroom. One of the big works we will have is a knobbed cylinder. This work is used in the Early Childhood classroom and has so many direct and indirect learning purposes! It will help the toddlers learn visual discrimination of dimensions, prepare for math and writing, and develop their small motor skills. We can’t wait for all of our fun activities and themes during summer camp starting in July!