Literacy: I Will Do My Best to Be My Best
 

The Winter Semester marches forward with the emotions Anger and Sadness and continues to challenge the Clients with writing words that start with each letter in these words – a great exercise many of them want to continue at home. It's amazing the words that Clients can create from a piece of paper and a pencil/pen and a little inspiration. Keep your eyes open for the blank notebooks they are bringing home from their “bonus with purchase” from The Store. They asked for the notebooks and Prep delivered.

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Clients continue to identify words like Calm, Comfort and Love and again we would be thrilled to know if they are using these words at home. Literacy rotation follows after Skills-at-Will where they have been reciting a motto “I will do my Best to be my Best”!  It’s so rewarding to know they are retaining such an important motto and repeating it in Literacy.

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The next few weeks will be fun reading and choosing different endings to the book, Inside Out, and a new and wonderful story about another dog named Clancy. Everyone continues to give it their all supporting each other with their words, fist pumps and high fives.

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Math: Graphing Connections Between Us

 

In the past couple of weeks, the Clients have been exploring the world of graphing and data; how analyzing and exploring our everyday lives can provide a deeper connection between ourselves and the people we interact with every day.

Connecting how we feel about different sports in bar graphs then advancing to learning about Pie Charts, we discovered how these connections work as part of the whole picture.

The Clients have also been talking about chores at home or The Choice Chart at Prep and how these chores make us feel when we do them versus how they make us feel after they’re completed which is usually a whole lot better!

‘The Store’ week recently is always exciting! Working together with the Skills-at-Will rotation has made the whole process a lot more streamlined and comfortable for the Clients. Every Client worked in The Store and got a chance to be a customer. Lots of items were purchased but Clients are always encouraged to explore other options with their money, such as saving for the next Store or sharing their money into a Collection Donation Box.  In the upcoming weeks, we will be exploring and delving deeper into our second and final Store this Semester. Overall, a very positive and strong growth period for all Clients as we examine what it is that we feel and how we can connect better with ourselves and the people around us through Math.

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Science: Digesting Our Love of Food

 

As we continue building self-awareness through learning about our bodies, we have moved on from the brain to a journey through the digestive system. Very fitting given how much we all love food here at Prep! It is important to understand why our bodies need food and how that food affects our bodies. In addition to discussions and reading passages, hands-on and sensory activities are a great way to reinforce these lessons.

We have started the digestive pathway by learning more about the mouth; the ‘biter’, ‘chewer’ and ‘taster’. Biting into different foods allowed us to see the different jobs that each type of tooth has. Next, we put our taste buds to the test to compare different flavours. Moving forward, we will be putting our sequencing skills to work as we learn about the esophagus, stomach, and intestines. Our life-sized body maps will become more detailed with each new step.

Valentine’s Day celebrations included some ‘love bug’ snack creations along with some Valentine trail mix. What an imaginative group we have! These fun food experiences (more to come!) are a great complement to the science curriculum.

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Art: Turn That Frown Upside Down

 

Our word for Weeks 4 & 5, ‘Calm’ allowed us to explore the antithesis to ‘Anger’.  Using ‘Mr. Grumpy’ from the Mr. Men book series, we were able to describe the expression, “Turn that frown upside down!” through large bubble-like letters drawn free-hand on posters with a message that was both literal as well as visual.

Our latest emotion theme of ‘Sadness’ has opened up our focus toward love and friendship. Everyone had tons of fun creating pop-up Valentine’s Day cards following step-by-step instructions and adding personal flourishes.  The results were really special and a source of great pride!

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Skills-at-Will: Positive Affirmations

Throughout the last few weeks in Skills-at-Will, we have been exploring Anger. Exploring different ways to react to anger and learning different techniques to focus on has included different breathing techniques, yoga and positive affirmations. Trying to emphasize positive affirmations and breathing techniques has been our main goal in understanding this invasive emotion and how to cope with it.

In the next few weeks we will continue to explore Sadness, then Fear. Both emotions have very distinctive features and reactions. We will be exploring these emotions by completing group exercises maintaining focus on sounds and friendships. In addition, we incorporated the emotions of love for Love Week by testing our memories with a Valentine’s matching card game as well as giving out positive affirmation valentine cards to one another. These positive affirmations highlighted what the clients saw as personal strengths, good attributes, and recognizing skills in other Clients.

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