Our Solar System

To the solar system and beyond! We learned about the 8 planets, the sun and other stars, and the moon the week before last (Last week was assessments, thank you all for coming)! So, its obvious that we needed to start the week with a blast by making our baking soda and vinegar rockets! What a great way to practice counting backwards from 10.

We also made these rockets to take home.  Just a straw and a puff of air to get these rockets launched!

We used our 3-D glow in the dark planets, along with our planets poster to help us put the planets in order.  Which planet is your favorite?

This center was definitely our favorite for the week! Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good picture to show the full effect. But, for a writing center, we practiced writing our letters in the dark! I set this up in our toy closet. You can't tell that they are in the dark because of my flash (didn't work without the flash either, that made it too dark), but I painted this piece of canvas with glow-in-the-dark paint and then we used LED light pens to write our letters and they lit up! We also had glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls, and a black light in the room for the full effect.

\For a math center, we made these countdown rockets. We has stamps from 1-10 and the kids were instructed to color their rocket and countdown from 10 to 1 with the stamps.

We also practiced our letter recognition by doing what is called "reading the room". I wrote every letter of the alphabet on a star and placed them around the room. We used flashlights to find the letters and make them 'shine'.

We talked about what life on other planets might like and made our own aliens.

We named some of the constellations and made our own constellations with at our lite brite center.

We played another great strategy game called Day and Night by Smart Games.  The picture shows just a shadow picture of the pieces, and the kids had to try to build that picture by using their colored pieces. By it just showing the shadow, the lines of the pieces are not defined, this makes for a fun challenge.

We read the book Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and played the board game. 

And, we drew pictures on our Crayola Glow book and watched our stories come to life with the moving 3-D glow effect. So fun!

Books of the week:

Dr. Suess' There's No Place Like Space

and

Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Thank you all for your support and help! The assessments went really well last week! You are all great!

Winter time

Winter is here! Or, is it? Well, it was in our preschool this week...snow and all.

We talked about different winter items with these miniature look-a-likes. 

We also had miniatures for the other 3 seasons.

We made these cute name snowmen. I got this idea from marcheseclowns.blogspot.com.

For a science center, we talked about how salt helps melt ice, which is why we sometimes see parents tossing it onto our driveways after a big snowstorm. We tried this out by helping our counting bears escape the ice blocks. We used water, salt, and a some tools to break and melt the ice. One class got all the bears out, and the other one came so close!

We also had these polar animal puppets and snow balls (cotton balls) and these animals had their own indoor snowball fight. 

We learned about the 4 seasons and what happens within each season with these floor puzzles.

We are reviewing our shapes to prepare for our upcoming assessments, so we used our shape snowmen and helped them find their shape buttons. I found this cute snowman online, and adapted it to have different shaped buttons that matched our buttons.

For a math center, we fed the hungry penguins. Each penguin had a different number on his belly, and we fed them that many goldfish crackers. We fed ourselves some too!

And, we played in the snow this week too! Shaving cream snow, that is. We sprayed a small amount on the table and practiced writing our names in it. Surprisingly, not as messy as you would think. The kids liked the texture too. Some kids just do not like to get their hands messy, but every child but one tried this center.

We made some yellow yarn Y's. We talked about the letters Y and Z this week. 

We had some mittens to warm our hands after we played with the bears in the ice. Addison is sporting them so nicely in this photo. And still working on her Y too!

We've completed the alphabet! Yay! We had our foam letter mats out and put them in order from A-Z. The kids did very well!

Books of the week: 

The Twelve Days of Winter by Deborah Lee Rose

and

How Big is a Million by Anna Milbourne

We also made some cute penguin snow sticks. We can use them to measure how much snow we get, if and when it comes!

And, we celebrated Aubrey turning 4 this week. Happy Birthday Aubrey!