Welcome to the The Aurora’s Gazette. You can expect the Gazette twice monthly on Fridays. It will update you as to the goings on in our classroom, and give you full picture of our Brown Room community!

And now, for this week’s Gazette:

The Write Stuff

As we mentioned in our last Gazette, children have begun regularly writing their names as another way to sign in each day.

Helping friends write their names and check out books has been a new favorite activity in the classroom. We’ve been further supporting this work in various ways throughout the classroom.

Fine motor strength in a very important piece to the writing puzzle. To hold a writing utensil, child must have an understanding of how much pressure to apply to the pencil, crayon or pen, while also focusing on how to appropriately manipulate it to create the desired lines and curves… and that’s just the start of it! We’ve opened a classroom hair salon and make up studio to facilitate some of this work. The kids have been working to build strong fingers by pinching clips, moving their strong wrists to curl hair, and both fingers and wrists to tie hair bands on the heads of our brave mannequin models! In the make up salon, children have been at work using their strong fingers to pick up miniature figures of nail polish, lipstick, lotion and more, which they they carefully apply to our classroom animals. The students built the hair salon themselves by ripping and arranging tape, practicing yet another, particularly tricky, fine motor skill! Next week, we’ll be introducing ‘nail polish’ in twist cap bottles (really washable tempera paint!) into the mix as a way to further these skills

Beside our salon, we use a bevy of other fine motor building materials, such as LEGOS, Zoobs, and beading to help children build their finger and wrist strength.

On our wall, we have a classroom alphabet (Borrowed from a favorite book, “On Market Street” by Anita and Arnold Lobel). The Aurora’s have been referring back to it on our wall, enthusiastically working to recognize the different letters and finding what letters ‘belong’ to different members of the class!

A big piece of this writing puzzle will be beginning our Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, something that we will begin to explicitly start next week with the children as ‘have to’ work at our tables in full and half groups. This curriculum uses a hands on, multi sensory approach to help children build writing and fine motor skills. Earlier this year, we mentioned our use of the HWT wooden lines and curves to help children begin to think about how letters are shaped. We have begun to do this work more explicitly, during Open Time by introducing more aspects of the work into the mix, such as having children work with specific letters cards as we form letters and names. As we dig into this curriculum, we will work with more of the tools providing by the programming, such as workbooks, sand cards with letters, and chalk/chalkboards.

Questions to Ask Your Aurora:

1. Why do you think people are frightened of cockroaches?

2. Why was Monday a gray day on the calendar?

3. Why did you eat pasta on Wednesday instead of Thursday?