This Moment in Time

 A Friday ritual that captures one moment in our week.  No words, or thoughts. Just a picture!  Happy weekend to all.

Wednesday Fun!

Mrs. Broome has been joining us on Wednesday mornings this year to share her joy of reading and writing.  The children adore her as she always brings surprises in her bags of materials and delightful voices as she reads aloud. One way to inspire children to write is to encourage them to draw a picture of what they want to write about.  Unfortunately, children sometimes become discouraged with their drawing because it doesn’t come out the way they want.  Mrs. Broom has a solution for that!  She put together a set of guides for the children to follow so that they could easily draw a variety of animals.  The children thought these guides were terrific and have continued to use the guides in their writing work and in their art work.  

Valentine's Day

I know I am a bit late with these, but here are a few snapshots from Valentine's Day!

Look at this amazing treat!  One kind and generous Grandmother made this beautiful gingerbread treat along with individual cookie packages for each of the kids to take home.  It was a huge hit!  Thank you!

Passing out Valentines.  They are each so sweet!  Hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's with your "sweeties" too! 

100 Day Collections

Legos rule supreme at HCMA.  We build legos, talk legos, have action figure play with legos!  We love legos, so this 100th day collection fits in nicely around here!  This motivated mathematician sorted his collection into groups of twenty!  When this student finished his labeling quickly, he helped the others with sorting, organizing and writing number labels.  I especially like the team work that went into solving the problem with the Candy Corn collection.  Seems one Candy Corn was consumed, leaving only 99 for sorting.  The children decided to split one Candy Corn in half, making 100 pieces again.  Problem solved!

This mathematician decided to be industrious and sort his work into groups of 5!  All went according to plan until the last group of 5. . .  seems Cheerios don't travel all that well in the hands of a rambunctious 5 year old (and they taste good too) so the last few Cheerios were a little crumpled!  All finished well though, we decided that the last little pile looked like it would have been five Cherrios!

Pecans from Texas!

I especially like this collection!  Inside the little cups are M&Ms.  We had to put them in cups because this section of the classroom is especial crooked and the floor slopes downward!  Thus the table slopes too (try sitting in a children's chair on the sloped side, to eat your lunch. . . . ) so to keep the M&M's from rolling we had to dig out the cups.  What is so special about this collection is the labels.  The child was very concerned about all of his friends receiving their fair share of M&Ms, notice the labels made with everyone's name!  Very fair indeed!  

If you are in the neighborhood this weekend, we would love to see you at our Open House.  It is Saturday at 10! See you there!

Ski Day!

How can it be that it is only the middle of February and our ski program is over?  We skied through icy days, powder days, and cold days, but now that the great skiing is here, our program is over.  A sad reality, but we had a wonderful day last Friday soaking up the spring conditions and making beautiful turns together!

The ski program would not have been possible without the great parents at HCMA helping out.  Not only was it essential to have parent volunteers to get us and all of our gear to the Mountain, it was also essential to have these parents to get us all safely up the lift!  A very special thank you to Sarah who accompanied us each and every week!  

Look at the beautiful corduroy behind the girls!  The conditions were just perfect his last week.  Perhaps we will be able to find spring sking specials to get us out on the hill again!

Happy Boys!

These pictures were all taken while the children warmed up and waited for their instructor in the magic carpet area.    After working with our ski coach to make big turns across the entire mountain we ventured up the six pack!

The view from the top was fantastic!