Who is Your Neighbor?

Today was a very busy day! During our morning circle we practiced counting to 30, and identifying the days of the week and months of the year. We talked about October being the next month on the calendar and things we like to do in October.

The kids were very excited for music class! We started by singing the hello song to our friends. Then we sang "What's Your Name." The first time we sang the song we shared our names with the group and then the next time she shared one of our friend's names. When we sang "What Do You Like" today we each shared a place we like to go. Dhruv likes the library, Austin likes the Amtrak station, Tripp likes the swimming pool, Jack M. likes restaurants and Jack D. likes the beach. Singing "Shake Your Sillies Out" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" got our bodies moving. Before singing the goodbye song they brought special instruments for us to use! Each kid had a colored hand bell and we used them to make the music to sing "It's a Small World." They loved being musicians!

Our story today was "Too Tall Houses" by Gianna Marino. Owl and Rabbit are good friends and live in two small houses next to each other. They are perfectly happy . . . until Rabbit's garden gets in the way of Owl's view. So Owl builds his house a little taller. Only that blocks the sun from Rabbit's vegetables. So Rabbit builds his house taller. And soon it's a house-building frenzy and the two now not-so-good friends have the two tallest houses in the world! All it takes is a gust of wind to remind them that maybe living smaller and together is a much better way to remain friends. After reading the story we defined neighbors. They are the people that live beside you. We want to be nice to our neighbors and wave hello, invite them to dinner and play with their kids. We compared different size houses. There are tall, short, big, and small houses....some look the same and others look different.

For art the kids made two houses that were neighbors. They followed specific directions on where to put the house, roof, door, windows, sun and tree. At the end we had two happy neighbors on our paper.

We ended the day with the kids favorite songs and we learned a new one about a house!