Easter and Spring time!

Rain Song by Handwriting Without Tears

It’s raining, it’s pouring

Puddles in the street

I’ve got my raincoat

Boots for my feet

I’m going outside

Playing with Sam

We’ll find a puddle and

We’ll make a dam

It’s raining, it’s pouring

Let’s get a boat

It’s raining, it’s pouring

Little sticks will float

It’s raining, it’s pouring

Such a happy day

I love when it rains

And we go out to play

We celebrated the rain this week with the above rain song. If you can't avoid it, may as well welcome it, right?

Along with the Spring rain, we also talked about carrots this week.  We read a Curious George book entitled The Perfect Carrot.  We learned about how carrots start as a seed and grow into a perfect carrot awaiting our picking. We even enjoyed this fun center where we were able to pick and re-plant some carrots still attached to their leaves.

We also practiced identifying and labeling our shapes with our spring inspired pattern block mats.

The kids were getting so quick at these  that we decided to make a game of it and see who could finish theirs the fastest. These are great. You can pick up the shapes at any learning store and print the mats off the internet at many sights just by searching pattern block mats.

My Mon.-Wed. class had an extra day this week because their spring break is next Monday, so they used watercolors to make their own kite to fly in the wind. They had such a great time mixing colors.

Another art project we did this week were these karo syrup eggs. These were a lot of fun. To do this we placed a small amount of karo syrup on the egg and had the children spread it around with a paintbrush. Then, add the food coloring a drop at a time and have the kids spread that with paintbrushes as well. They started with the green, red, yellow, and blue. They told me what color they wanted and if we didn't have that color we decided what colors we needed to use to make it. They had a great time mixing the colors and the end project is shiny and pretty. This activity takes a long time to dry (over  24 hours) but I love the end result because the karo syrup stays shiny and hardens like an egg.

In the spirit of Spring and Easter, we talked about eggs this week. My inspiration came from this book:

It talks about how chickens are not the only ones that lay eggs, and in a rhyming sequence tells what other animals/reptiles do.

Along with the book, this center also had some plastic eggs filled with pictures of the other animals that lay eggs. The children could open each egg to find a find a flamingo, crocodile, spider, snake, ect.

For some of our Easter festivities, we had an egg hunt and a ring toss. Unfortunately due to weather, both egg hunts had to be held indoors. It was no upset to the kids, however.

Before we headed upstairs for our egg hunt, we read a book entitled Last One is a Rotten Egg. It talks about an Easter egg hunt and how one cousin unfairly collects too many eggs and takes the special "golden egg" that his cousin really found first. In the end, he ends up dropping all of his eggs and ends up with nothing. Of course, his cousins end up sharing and there is a happy ending.

For our egg hunt, we each were instructed to find one "golden" bag filled with goodies, and 8 candy eggs. The kids were very good about only taking their share.

We then went back to the preschool to check out our findings:

We scored all kinds of goodies!

Here are a few pictures of the Easter egg toss:

Thank you to Evy (and mom) for these cute bunny cakes.

Our stars of the week this week were:

Haylee!

and Easton!

We spelled m-u-d and e-g-g this week. The kids are really getting the hang of blending. I am so excited to see some of the older children reading or so close to reading!