Safari animals

It's a zebra, it's a giraffe, it's a 

tiger, oh my! 

We could tell you what it is....by its pattern! We talked about all different safari animals this past week, and we talked about the different printed skin that each one has too.

We even made some of our own prints with our animal print stencils!

For our writing center, we had an animal alphabet book. We brought it home for extra practice, so help us remember to write in it! 

We put our uppercase and lowercase alphabet in order with these animal alphabet puzzles. 

We practiced spelling 3-letter words with our bananagrams. I found these sheets on pinterest here. 

Can you tell an animal by its sound? We practiced with our safari themed animal scramble game. The animal would make a sound, and we would have to cover that animal with the giraffe topper. It timed us as we went through a certain amount of animals, and we tried to improve on our time each round.

We talked about crocodiles and alligators this week too. Do you know the difference? We learned some differences. Some differences are that crocodiles have a longer head while an alligators is shorter and more U-shaped. Crocodiles have a fourth tooth that sticks out when its mouth is closed. And, alligators often appear darker skinned than crocodiles.

We also played this crocodile dentist game below. All of his teeth need pulled, but if you wiggle the wrong one, he will bite you! Oh snap!

And, we had this crocodile game I also found on pinterest here. Our version that we played was where we each took a card from the crocodile's mouth, and if it was a letter we were safe, But, if we grabbed a card that said "snap" on it, we had to give our cards to another player. The person with the most cards after all the cards were gone from the crocodile wins.

We used our math links for our math center, and called it monkey math. We worked on our addition skills this week. We took a monkey and added the amount of links written on its belly. We then did this with a sencond monkey, and then put the links together to see what the two numbers together added up to be.Check it out below.

We read a book this week called "Handa's Surprise". In this book, Handa carries some fruit in a basket on her head, and while she is carrying it to a friend, certain safari animals steal pieces of it on her way. At this center we practiced balancing baskets of fruit on our head, just like Handa!

Monkeying Around!

Our stars of the week this week are:

The incredible Ian

and the Magnificent Madison

Fairy tales

Once upon a time....in a preschool in West Jordan, we had a great time learning about princess', princes, jewels, and all things royal! We even made our own jewels below, using alum powder and water. 

We read a book called "The Princess and the Pizza", which is a spin off of the princess and the pea fairy tale. For this math center below, we enacted the story.We took turns hiding a pea below one of the mattress' and then we took turns rolling the die. We counted the number we landed on, and took that many mattress' off of our bed. Whoever found the pea got to hide it again.

We made our own crowns and added jewels and glitter.

And, speaking of jewel-covered crowns, we also covered the word 'crown' in jewels by tracing the letters in glue and adding small colorful jewels. 

And, what would a fairy tale land be without castles? For our sensory center, we had "cloud dough" and small fairy tale finger puppets in our sensory table. Cloud dough is made with flour and baby oil and it has a great consistency. You can play with it like sand, or you can mold it like dough!

There are many different shapes and sizes of castles, and we created some with our Castle Logix games. 

Another math center we did this week was our flashcard unifix cube math. We picked a flashcard, fairy tale themed of course, and picked out as many unifix cubes in the same color as our first addition number, and then picked a second color of unifix cubes for our second number. We then stuck them all together in a long line, and counted them up to get our answer.

We had some prince and princess magnetic dress-ups, along with some great imaginations, which make for some great stories!

We played our shrck and Disney matching games. 

We are working on writing our lowercase letters in our names, so we practiced our lowercase letters with our alphabet grid this week. 

We are also trying to distinguish between left and right in school. We talked about how our left hand makes the letter L when we hold our thunb and pointer finger at 90 degrees. Some other things that I always do, and you can also do at home, is I always say what foot I am putting their shoe on as I do, and what arm I am putting their coat or backpack on while I am helping them. 

Word of the week:

Crown

And, our stars of the week:

The loveable Lexi!

And exciting Ellison!