Bugs!!

Where do we begin? Bees, ants, caterpillars, ladybugs, centipedes, beetles......we talked about them all and more! We read a book called "I'm a Pill Bug" by Yukihisa Tokuda. This book told us how "potato bugs" and "roly poly" bugs are also called pill bugs. They like to live by people because they eat our leftover food, along with cement and rock! They like to live by their families so we should try to keep them in the same area that we find them in.
We also talked about the life cycle of the butterfly. We talked about how there are 4 stages a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. I know they won't remember all of the technical terms, but they may tell you it goes from an egg to a caterpillar to a cacoon to a butterfly. We then made this beautiful tie-dye butterfly for an art project.

To do this we simply colored a coffee filter with markers.

And then used eye droppers to drop water droplets onto the marker to give it the tie-dye effect.

After they dried, we added a body (clothespin) and pipe cleaner antenna and voila! We also added a piece of magnet to the back so that they can stick to the fridge or other metal.

We sorted bugs this week by size, color, and type.

Here Maxx, Brylnlyn, and Riley are sorting by size: small, medium, and large.

We also had a patterning center with our bugs.

The kids practicied both A,B,A,B patterning and AA,BB,AA,BB patterns. There were also some cards that had math problems on them.

For our uppercase to lowercase letter practice, we built these ladybug puzzles. Then we put the alphabet in order and sang our ABC's.

For a writing center this week, I wrote on the whiteboard with permanent marker and had the children trace over it with dry erase marker. All of the words were associated with bugs, of course!

Got bugs? We can help with that! For another letter recognition center we searched for, found, and squashed some bugs! I placed some bugs all around the room with each letter of the alphabet on them. I then called out a letter, and the children (3 at a time, I had 3 fly swatters) raced around the room to find that letter and swat that bug!

Gotcha!

We also had to play the classic games "Bed Bugs" and "Cootie"

And, thats not all! We had a discovery center where the children had tweezers and magnifying glasses and looked through the grass to find different bugs.

And we were able to explore with some real bugs. Some of these bugs were actually quite pretty and had some very vibrant colors.

Here Tyler and Evy are building puzzles.

And, Morgan is lacing some bug lacing mats.

We also talked about spiders this week. We talked about how they each have eight legs, and how they don't have a sense of smell. We also made our own spiderwebs.....big and small!

Our stars of the week this were:

Alex!

And NJ!

Thanks for such great support in helping your children with their posters. They are all doing such a great job telling about themselves and answering our questions.

We also had the pleasure of celebrating Morgan's birthday with her this week! Thanks for the yummy cupcakes Morgan. Hope you had a great day!

We have started practicing our program, but will really start role playing and practicing with props these next couple of weeks so please help your child to learn his/her part. Thanks!