Out of this world!

We do what we call "blastoff" in class each day, which is where we countdown from 10-1 while pointing to those numbers for number recognition. Every time we do this, the kids enjoy telling me where they blast off to......the moon, the North Pole, Disneyland, just to name a few. So, the kids and I were so excited for our Space theme!

This week we talked about the number 16. We followed our number 16 outline with these fluorescent stickers, and were excited to see them glow in the dark afterwards. I used a black light to do this, so the kids were so disappointed when they took them home and they didn't glow in the dark at their house. They asked me where they could get one of those special lights. :)

But, no worries, we made some beaded necklaces that had glow in the dark beads on them that actually did glow in the dark. :)

We talked about astronauts, and spaceships, and how people have really been to the moon. We made our own "moons" with our glow in the dark playdough and landed our space shuttles and astronauts on the moon.

The pictures do not do the glow in the dark any justice. It looked so much more awesome in person.

We also practiced our names with fluorescent highlighters, which also glow in the dark with a black light! They loved this!

And, our math center was our rocket ship countdown. The kids stamped their papers from 10-1, just like we practice with our "blastoff".

 We talked about what a constellation is , and made our own constellations, with our names! We could take them home and hang them in our window to have our name in the stars!

And, along with constellations, we made our own creations at our lite brite center.

We also had a glow in the dark drawing dome that they kids enjoyed, along with a crayola glow book that they could create their own glow in the dark stories on.

And, in our block area, we had these shape builders that we created our own rockets with. 3-2-1-blastoff!

And, of course, we made our own experimental rockets with baking soda and vinegar and watched them shoot to the ceiling as we counted down to one! It was a "blast"!!

We got to celebrate a birthday this week as well! Happy 5th birthday to this beautiful girl!

Happy Birthday Addison!

Health and Nutrition

Milk....it does a body good! Along with many other things! We spent a week talking about our health and nutrition. We discussed all of the good foods that our body needs, and then made this cute fruit and veggie person out of just that....fruits and vegetables! Our body needs (at ages 4 and 5) 2-3 fruits each day, and 3-5 vegetables. This fruit and veggie man helps us remember how many servings that we need each day!

We also talked about the food pyramid. We each chose a card from our healthy foods pile, and put it where it belonged on the food pyramid. 

Our literacy center this week was making alphabet soup! There was a can of soup for each letter of the alphabet. We mixed the soup in our pan, and then we had one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one beginning sound picture card that went in each can.

We also had some canned fruits and vegetables to help us with our counting to 10. Seven strawberries, please!

Thanks Addison!

In the dramatic play area, we practiced our penmanship with our grocery list writing. We looked for items on our helper lists, then wrote what we needed on our own list, and off to shop we went! We had baskets, and a cart, and all the items from our list to choose from!

We practiced our fine motor, color recognition, and math skills with our Avalanche Fruit stand game. All of the fruit gets piled onto the fruit stand, and we spin the spinner to see what we get to pick. But, watch out or it may all come tumbling down!

Another math center was our pizza party game. This game has 4 cheese pizzas that need their toppings. The chef tells the kids what toppings to add or take away, and at the end of him his order, he tells them exactly what should be on their pizza to see if they added and subtracted correctly.

We also had our pizza fractions! Would you like a whole, half, fourth, or eight of a pizza today?

We had our food groups matching mats. We chose a food group card, looked at the items on our card, and dug into our mystery box to try to feel for those items. First one to fill up there card wins!

We talked about not only what good things need to go into our bodies, but a bit about how our body works. We made this cute x-ray craft to talk about our bones.

We talked about the many bones that our body has, and how they help to protect our organs and allow us to walk and bend. I had some true to life x-rays for the kids to project onto the board and draw our body parts.

And, our bones help to protect our many organs! We briefly talked about some of our organs and how they function. 

And, our bodies need exercise! These exercise mats wore us out! We danced to some music, and when it stopped, we performed whatever exercise was on the mat we landed on. Dominic is doing a great job on the crab walk below.

And, our brain likes it when we read. Our tag and story readers help us to sound out those letters sounds!

We can't wait until the weather warms up a bit and we can do some exercise outside! But, we do a pretty good job of moving and grooving inside too! Wouldn't you agree?!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

I hope that everyone had a nice holiday break! It went really quick at our home, but I was excited to have the kids back and am ready to dive into the last half of the year. We are now starting to focus on recognizing our last names. We had our first names on our attendance chart and would find them and move them down to the school when we got there. Now, it is our last names that we will look for and move down to our school.

This week was themed around a well-known alphabet book by Bill Martin Jr. titled, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. It is the entire alphabet trying to climb a tree, and tumbling down because it gets too heavy. But, they never give up and try again. We had a coconut tree for centers today, the one Aria is holding below, that we had our velcro letters climb. We hid the letters in different coconuts (plastic Easter eggs) around the room, and as we found them, we added them to our tree.

We also made our own version of the coconut tree. The kids chose letters in their name, and other craft foam letters to have climb their tree. We then talked about what letter made it to the top on their tree first.

We had these Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees at our literacy center where we would grab a coconut out of our letter bag, and find its uppercase or lowercase counterpart and add it to our tree.  

And, since monkeys love to climb trees, we had our monkey math links out for our math center. Each monkey has a number from 1-20 on its belly, and we added that many math links to its arm.

We also had our monkey alphabet links. Each monkey had a capital letter of the alphabet on its belly, and their arms snapped together so that we could make one big monkey alphabet chain.

And, our writing center was our magnet boards. The kids could write on the boards just as they were and work on their names on the number we are working on, or we have cards that can be placed over the magnet boards to guide them on formation of each letter of the alphabet.

We are having our parent-teacher conferences the week of January 21st, so please check your child's backpack to note your designated date and time. Please have them back to me as soon as possible so that any changes that need to be made can be accommodated.

Thanks!!