This week in Shale room we have been busy bees exploring, playing and creating memories that leave lasting impressions! We have enjoyed continuing on exploring how we can move our bodies in small ways as well as big ways! This week we explored playing in the sand box dumping with our kitchen pots and pans, we explored coloring with crayons at wake up time. We explored playing at the park on the big climber it was interesting to see the children sliding down the slide, climbing the big steps and playing in the sand. WOW what a great way we could explore using our whole bodies in different ways. This week the children of shale seemed to be really interested in the voices they could make with their bodies both little noise and big. We have noticed some of the children starting to say some of their first words! Lots of babbling and new noises! To support the children’s beginning exploration of sound we have made some new shaker bottles that have various objects in them that make either noise or no noise and the children have seemed to really enjoy playing with these as well as we continue to sing songs outside in our play space and inside in our room. We will continue to create more shaker bottles and exploring the movement of different sounds and singing and see if this is a continuing interest for the children. We have started to introduce some new signs with the children, “help” “wash” “stop” “sit” and continuing to work on “more” “eat” and “all done”. The shale room children have shown a growing interest for reading so we have spent some time bringing new books into the room and reading in our quiet corner on the fuzzy purple carpet. This week we also explored color by exploring colorful ribbons, pompoms and balls on the table with paint chips, we enjoyed feeling the different textures and ripping the paint chips up. This week we welcomed two more friends to shale room, we look forward to the ever changing dynamic of shale and the personalities they will add to our shale family.