MAY
Monthly Parrots Newsletter
The central idea for the third quarter is How the World Works, helping children explore the natural world and understand how things around them change, move, and connect. Through play, investigation, art, storytelling, and movement, children build understanding of real-world phenomena in meaningful, hands-on ways.
Every month, we’ll introduce new connected vocabulary words that relate to our classroom learning topics. These words help build your child’s language and understanding as they explore new ideas. Be sure to check in with your child’s teacher to see which words they’re focusing on for the current unit!
In May, we begin our next unit: We Can Explore Our Five Senses to Understand the World Around Us! Children will investigate how they use their senses including sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch to explore and make sense of their environment. Each week, we will focus on a different sense, encouraging children to observe, question, and interact with the world around them through engaging academic workshops and hands-on discovery experiences. Let’s look at what your child will be exploring in each area…
In literacy, children use sensory vocabulary and descriptive language to explore and talk about the world around them. Through activities like mystery touch bags, sound walks, and taste explorations, children draw, label, and dictate their observations while practicing letter recognition and writing with initial sounds.
As the unit continues, children build phonological awareness through rhyming games, syllable clapping, and blending and segmenting sounds to create simple CVC words connected to their sensory experiences. They also create and retell stories from shared texts, such as sensory-themed read-alouds, using drawings and early writing.
Toward the end of the unit, children share their opinions about what they see, hear, taste, and feel, practicing simple sentence structure and expressing preferences through both speaking and writing.
Magic Words continue to be learned through playful, meaningful experiences during reading, games, and conversation. Instead of relying on old-fashioned sight word drills, we’ll focus on just one or two magic words each week. Children will explore these words through fun, hands-on activities, interactive games, shared reading, and meaningful conversations. This helps build vocabulary and allows children to automatically recognize and use important words, boosting their early reading confidence and comprehension.
Magic Words: yellow, play, two, make
In math, children explore numbers and problem-solving through hands-on sensory experiences. Using activities like sound counting with claps and beats, texture sorting, and taste graphing, children count, compare, and represent quantities within 10. They practice simple addition and subtraction using movement and real objects while exploring concepts of more, less, and same.
As the unit continues, children measure and compare length and weight using classroom materials, and create repeating patterns with tactile items. They also begin composing and decomposing numbers in meaningful ways connected to their sensory investigations.
Toward the end of the unit, children collect and analyze data by sorting, counting, and graphing their observations, such as favorite smells or textures, while solving simple real-world math problems using concrete objects and number lines.
In inquiry, children use their five senses to investigate and make sense of the world around them. Through hands-on experiences like mystery touch bags, scent exploration, sound walks, and taste tests, children observe, ask questions, and describe what they notice about their environment.
As the unit continues, children explore each sense more deeply, making connections between their senses and how they help us learn. They compare textures, identify and describe sounds, and observe how different environments affect what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.
Toward the end of the unit, children reflect on their sensory experiences, share their discoveries, and begin to understand how their senses work together to help them explore and understand the world.