Half Note Class 2016-2017: PET WEEK

Dear Parents,

We had quite a busy week making pet houses, birds, and aquariums. We introduced our pet theme with 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, sunshine, exercise, and friends. The differences were: dogs and cats walk on four legs and people walk on two. People talk and sing and dogs bark.

After our discussion the children created their own pet houses by painting coffee boxes and decorating them with animal stickers. Finally, they added shingles to the roof of their house and placed a carpet inside.

Then the children put on a wonderful talent show with their pets. Each child demonstrated how talented their animals were. Tima's giraffe caught a ball. Ava's hippo threw a dog bone. Justin's dog caught a bone. Conrad's pig rolled over. Antonio's monkey climbed up a chair. Luisa's dog played with a ball. Giselle's dog rolled a ball. Emma's dog jumped up into the air. Gaurav's dog slid on the ice. Devika's moose jumped up into the sky. Helene's dog climbed on the wall and Izzie's dog ate a bone and played with a ball.

One of the highlights of the week was when 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 for 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.

I think Geddy had almost as much fun performing for the children
as they did watching him. Did you know, according to bird experts, some parrots have the reasoning skills of a three year old child? I am not sure if that is true but, it only took Geddy two weeks to
learn how to put a basketball in a net. Geddy is twenty-three years old and is expected to live another seventy years or more.

After seeing what a parrot looks like, the children made their own version of a bird. They decorated it with markers, feathers and added eyes to it. The birds look adorable displayed on our classroom bulletin board.

We celebrated Helene's 4th birthday this week. Thank to her family for the delicious treats.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HELENE!

We ended our week by making aquariums. We decorated them by using fish cutouts, paper reinforcements (for the bubbles), and painted on a mixture of corn syrup and blue food coloring, which represented the water.