Valentine's

Roses are red

Violets are blue

What is a poem?

Now WE can tell you!



Yes, indeed!  We learned what a poem is in honor of St. Valentine.  We talked about how a lot of poems have rhyming words in them.  We read a poem about our mom, and one about our dad and brought them home to give to you parents.

We also had our Valentine's party.  We made our own bags to carry our treats.  This is how they turned out:

We had fun distrubuting our treats to our friends.  You parents and children were very creative!  We had some very fun valentine's!

We also went on a treasure hunt.  We had 8 different rhyming clues that eventually led us to:

                           COOKIES!!  We each got to decorate and eat our own heart snack. 

"Sticking" with the hearts theme, we played a fun relay race where we had to use a straw and suck up a heart shape so that it 'stuck' to our straw without using any hands and carry it to the container on the other side of the room.

Surprisingly, some were even better than the kids I played this game with in my daughter's second grade classroom!  You go kids!!

We also played a game with conversation hearts where we stacked as many as we could without them toppling over, and when they did, we still won by getting to eat them! :)

For a reading center, I put each letter of the alphabet on a heart and stuck them all around the room.  The children then took turns using my pointers and found each letter in the alphabet.  This concept is called "reading the room".  Each of you can also do this at home with the letters in your child's name, numbers, or letters of the alphabet.  They had a great time racing each other to find the next letter.

For an art project, we made heart-shaped fish.  Even the bubbles the fish blew were heart-shaped!

For a math center, we did graphing.  We had two charts that were labeled red and white and then we had some lima beans that were red on one side, and white on the other.  The children were instructed to take 5 beans and drop them to see if they landed on the white side or the red side and then color in that many cubes on their chart to see which color would reach the top first.

They made it a race between each other and each child did multiple graphs.  Great for counting, comparisons, and fine motor skills such as coloring and picking up the beans.

We also had a language center of rhyming puzzles this week. 

And, for a sensory station, we talked about volumes and the children got to play in the sand with different spoons to fill up different cups and containers. 

They had funnels, and measuring spoons, and different tools that they could use to compare different ways of filling containers the fastest, as well as deciphering which container could hold more.

We also have a game that we have started playing quite frequently called "I have a name."  This game is super easy and one that you can play at home as well.  I start off by saying "I have a name and it......." and then there are various ways we play.  We sometimes talk about beginning sounds and have to make the sound of the letter our name starts with.  We sometimes talk about what letter our name ends with, or the ending sound.  Be creative.  Ex:  I have a name and it starts with "ju" (the sound of the letter J for Jennae).  Ex:  I have a name and it ends with E.  Ex:  I have a name and it sounds like Jennae (clap when saying your name and talk about syllables).

We celebrated Zak turning 5 this last week!!  Happy Birthday Zak! 

Next week:  Pets!



Food Pyramid and Nutrition

We continued to talk about our bodies last week, focusing on the food pyramid and healthy habits.  We talked about the different food groups, and how we need different proportions of each one.  We talked about how some of the best tasting foods are not always the best for our bodies, but that it is not bad to eat them sometimes.  We talked a lot about fruits and vegetables.  We even did a lemon project where we made lemons that smelled like real lemons.  The kids each tasted some lemon juice, and most of them liked it and came back for more! 

For one of our centers, we looked at different foods and decided if it was a fruit or a veggie.

After we separted them, we turned over our fruits and vegetable posters, and checked if we got them all right.

For a vocab center, we played a fun game from Lakeshore called Shop and Match.

The object of this game is to be the first one to find all of the grocery items on your list.  You choose items from the bag, and if they are on your list, you put them in the proper food group on your tray and the first one to have all of their items is the winner.  The children really enjoyed this game.

The above center was one that we did to help us learn more about the different food groups in the food pyramid.  I had a container that was color-coded to match each color of the pyramid, and the children has many different pieces of food that they put into the correct container.  They did a great job deciding where each food item belonged!  I was impressed!

For a fine motor center, we practiced our cutting and pasting.  Kylie above just finished cutting out a healthy piece of food out of a magazine, and then pasted it to her picture.

We had a couple of math centers this week.  One was these puzzles above that Cy and Morgan are doing.  We simply count the items on one side of the puzzle, and then find the corresponding number to complete the second half of the puzzle.

We also talked about simple fractions and more, less, or the same.  The children had three different pizzas and I would make one pizza and have them make the other two to equal either more, less, or the same as mine. 

Another fine motor project that we did was our bean pictures.  We talked about how beans are a part of the meat and beans food group.  The children were really creative in doing this project.  They were asked to draw a picture of ANYTHING they wanted and then we traced their drawings with glue and they glued their beans to their pictures.  Look how creative and great their pictures were!

I did not help them at all!  Impressive!

A fun science project that we did this week was to see how much air that our lungs could hold.  To do this project, take a 2-liter bottle and fill it full of water.  Next, put some tubing in the liter and turn it upside-down into some shallow water so that none leaks out.  Then take the tube and blow into it.  As our air goes into the bottle, it pushes the water out.  We marked where each child's water level ended up on the bottle.  The children had a blast.

I used cleansing wipes and a new topper for each child to ensure that we were being clean and sanitary!! :)

We sang "On top of spaghetti" for our song this week.  Ask your child to sing it for you.  They thought it was hilarious.

On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.

It rolled off the table,
And on to the floor,
And then my poor meatball,
Rolled out of the door.

It rolled in the garden,
And under a bush,
And then my poor meatball,
Was nothing but mush.

 So if you eat spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball,
In case of a sneeze!

Thank you to Addison for bringing this creative, adorable,  and healthy snack for us so fitting for our week on nutrition!  The kids loved it!

We reviewed the letters F (fruits) and V (vegetables) this week.  We also learned about the number 18.

Next post:  Valentine's party and crafts!!  Stay tuned!

Valentine's keepsake

I just wanted to pass along a fun idea that we have been doing for the last several years in our home with the valentines the kids collect from their friends in class. My daughter likes to keep EVERYTHING, so I was excited when my sister-in-law gave me this great idea that she found in the family fun magazine a few years back.
                                           

A placemat!

All you need is some contact paper (found at any grocery store) and two pieces of either construction paper or cardstock. Take one piece of contact paper, sticky side up, and stick both pieces of contruction paper to it lengthwise. Add all of your valentines with glue or tape, and place a second piece of contact paper over top of the valentines, sticky side down, so that both pieces of contact paper stick to each other. Voila! Done. Now your kids can keep their valentines and you won't have to find them all over the house for the next several months. McKenzie made her first one in 2007 and we still use it! We LOVE this idea!

Our Bodies

Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes (repeat).....eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.  This song was a perfect start to our lesson on our body.  This week we talked about our bodies, both inside and out! 

We talked about our bones, and how bones and muscles help our body to be strong and give us shape.  Our skeleton also protects our organs.

We made our own skeleton using Q-tips. 

We talked about our different organs, and what each organs function is.  We each got to have a turn wearing our body vest and correctly placing the organs on our bodies.

For a math center, we used our "hands" to do some simple addition problems.  We hid all of the fingers, unfolded the first number of fingers, then unfolded the second number and counted them together to get the total.  The gloves were filled with flour and the kids loved the feel of them. 

For a writing center, we wrote thank you notes to the dentist office for letting us visit, and to firefighter Tom for visiting our school.

For a math center, we used lima bean manupulatives to count to ten.  I had them recite the numbers as they placed the beans on the stickers so they practiced both sequencial order along with number recognition.

We also had a vocab center where we had pictures of a boy with arrows pointing to his hands, and another one with arrows pointing to his feet.  Then we had different aerobic and non-aerobic activities that were done with our hands or our feet and we had to place them under the correct body part. 


We also talked about how important exercise is for our bodies.  Our bodies need food, water, and exercise.   We discussed how exercise makes our heart beat faster and ran around the room until we could feel our heart beating quickly.  We also had an aerobic center:

Where we stretched, did some sit-ups, lifted some weights and did some jumping jacks.  We were tired!

For a writing center this week we did stamping.  We had a column of letters that we searched for the matching letter and stamped it in the next row.  Then, in the last row we took a pencil and practiced making that letter. 

We also made our own body books to bring home to tell you about our bodies.  We saw some real x-rays and even a real cast from when my daughter broke her arm.   And, speaking of broken bones, stay tuned for next week as we learn about how to stay healthy and strong by following the food pyramid and maintaining healthy habits!