Huckleberry Cheesecake Newsletter, 9/14/07

OK, ok, so I promise to stop cheating and publish a real post....but not today. Work has been nuts (that's what I get for taking 12 days off!), and yesterday was Rosh Hashanah (Lily was devastated to discover that, while we were celebrating "the world's birthday," we we not doing so with cake...yes, I was forced to make an emergency stop at a bakery to buy cupcakes for the "celebration").

I just haven't had time to actually upload our vacation photos.

I PROMISE I'll get to it this weekend.

I'll have great incentive too...tomorrow marks Lily's first DANCE CLASS (we "had" to buy the most adorable, tiny tap shoes and ballet slippers!). She has to wear a skirted leotard, dance tights, proper shoes....hair tied away from the face....whole nine yards. I cannot wait to document it on film!

Anyway, this week was an exciting one at school. It was the week of the dinosaur, complete with a field trip today to the Museum of Natural History to see the giant dino bones! Read on and enjoy!!


Dear Strawberry Parents,

It was a T-riffic week while exploring the prehistoric world of dinosaurs like the T-Rex, brachiosaurus, stegosaurus, apotosaurus and triceratops. These were some pretty tricky words to pronounce but not for our budding paleontologists. We started off learning some interesting facts about dinos such as those with long necks also have long tails to help distribute their weight so they don't tip over (concept of balance), herbivores are plant lovers and eat only plants while carnivores eat meat. The Strawberries were asked the question, "Would you be a meat or vegetable eater?" then asked to say what kind of food they would eat if they were a dinosaur. We also learned that dinos came in many different sizes ranging from very small to enormous! Many of the dinosaurs, mostly the herbivores, had built in defense weapons, like long and sharp spikes, horns, and tail clubs to help fight off other predator dinos. I'm sure you can imagine how intrigued the strawberry class became while learning such eye opening details about these grizzly looking creatures.

Circle time activities were rich with matching and sorting of dinosaur skeletons, identifying the first letter of a dinosaur and matching it to the beginning letter of a Strawberry's name and placing spikes on a dinosaur's body and counting them. Seeing the dinosaur names in print helped us identify letters while counting how many letters in each dino name. We reached deep into our vocab bag and discovered some new words to describe dinosaurs like fierce, extinct, bumpy, scaley. The book picks for the week were abundantly filled with dino stories and facts, our favs being, Dinos on the Go, Dinosaur Days, Dinosaur Roar, Dinosaur Dinners, and The Trouble with Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The Strawberries went on an "excavation" looking for dinosaur bones and remains in the sand table. We weren't sure what we'd find in there! The Strawberries continued with dramatic play as they followed the dinosaur footprint path of the color print they chose. At the end of the various colored footprints, a different dinosaur was discovered. Adding to the fun, check out our dinosaur puppets and dinosaur drawings using white crayon and watercolors. This week was dino-mite!

The Strawberries really enjoyed their day at the Natural History Museum! Thanks very much to Jen and Kathleen for making the journey with us. Not only did Jasper and Conor have fun, but you made it fun and enjoyable for all!

Emily Post appears next week as our special guest to talk about manners and being polite, a week not to be missed! If there's anything in particular you'd like for us to stress as it relates to manners, please let us know and we'll work it into our lesson plan.

All the best,
The Strawberry Teachers