Once upon a time......

.....in a preschool full of cute children, we had a wonderful week filled with sand castles, jewels, and fairy tale endings! And, with the snazzy crowns upon their heads, your kids made some pretty darn cute prince and princesses.

I found this awesome recipe here for this sand that resembles moon sand. It can be packed and holds its shape until the kids want to break it. Perfect for making our magical castles.

So easy to make and the kids absolutely loved it. They wanted to take it home but I told them I would let you know how to make it on here, and let you choose if you want sand castles in your home in the middle of winter. :)

We also made castles with two castle block games called Castle Logix and Camelot Jr. If you have never heard of these games and your kids like to solve puzzles and build, you must check them out! They have a book in them with different castle block puzzles to build at different levels of play. Some of them only work if they are put together just right. Great fine motor and brainstorming activity.

We had fun with these magnetic dress ups, and yes, the boys played too! They had different outfits that the kids could mix-and-match. And, the price and princess had matching outfits too.

For a math center we did this crown counting found from prekinders.com. They had a sheet filled with crowns, and they would roll a die, count the number it landed on, and add that many jewels to cover their crowns. They did this until their sheet was filled with the jewels.

At our reading center, we had finger puppets and fairy tales. The kids could find their favorite fairy tale and act it out with these assorted puppets.

I also got this princess and the pea math center idea from prekinders.com. I had 3 beds with 20 matresses on them each (just like in the book) and the kids hid the pea (green bead) somewhere between the mattresses. They would then roll the die, and take that number of mattresses off the bed until they found the pea.

We also searched for treasures in the sand table.

One of the letters we talked about this week was the letter s. We found and circled all of the S's in our Star Light, Star Bright poem.

We reviewed letters Q,R.S and practiced forming them with our dry erase letters.

And, we made this cute Santa countdown to start Dec. 1st. We can add a piece of santa's beard to his chin, and when its done, Christmas Eve will be here!

It's going to be a zoo next week as we talk about monkeys, tigers, and other zoo animals! Can't wait!