Be My Valentine!

We started out our week of love with a game called 'heart attack' this week. During circle time, we played a version of hot potato where we passed a bucket until the music stopped, and when it stopped on us we picked a paper from the bucket that either said "prize", "treat", or "heart attack". If they chose treat, they got to pick a treat out of our treat jar, if they chose prize, they picked a prize from the prize box, and if they chose heart attack, they were attacked by me with heart stickers all over their face and shirt! 

 I wanted to work on patterns with the kids this week, but I wanted it to be very child-directed. We had the 'I can make a pattern' worksheet below and they were instructed to make 3 patterns, in any order they chose. I can make a pattern! Or two, or three! 

Our math center was full of these hearts counting from 1-20. Each heart had the corresponding number of holes punched into it, and the kids were instructed to put that many links on. This is great for counting practice, along with number recognition. If the kids were unsure of what number it was by sight, they could count the holes and add that many links!

We also talked about the mail carrier this week. We discussed how we can make picutres and cards for our loved ones for Valentine's Day, and how we could even mail them to them through the mail. We had our cards, envelopes, and stamps at one table to write our letters. And, we had the mailboxes at another table for them to pretend to mail them. I let them play here at their leisure but each mailbox did have numbers 1-6 on them, so the kids were encouraged to put the same number of stampls on their letter as there was on the mailbox they were putting it in.

We worked on our addition skills with our balance beam at the below center. Each child would take a flashcard, and they would put the number of hearts of the first number (addend)on one side of the balance scale, and the same number of hearts as the second number (addend) on the other side of the scale, and count them one by one to add them together to get the sum. 

The kids were 'in love' with this sweethearts matching game. We raced to match couples like Mickey and Minnie, Donald and Daisy, and Shrek and Fiona.

And, of course, we partied! Your love bugs raced to play the heart relay game. This game is played by using straws and heart shaped cut outs. The object of the game is to suck on the straw to hold the heart-shaped cut out on the straw. The first team to get 5 cut-out hearts into the heart shaped plate is the winner!

We also played cupids helpers by shooting his arrows into the heart-shaped target. 

And, of course, we passed out Valentine's to our friends!!

One of our words of the week was the word HUG this week. And, what better hug is there out there than a bear hug?!

We made this cute bear hug craft to share with our favorite Valentine. 

And, check out our adorable stars this week!

Stars of the week:

Aria!!!

and

Kennadee!!!

Shadows and light

Spring is in the air!! Well, at least that is what Groundhog Phil says. Early Spring! And, in honor of  him, we talked about light and shadows this week. We even had a miniature version of him, (and her!), to project shadows of them with our flashlights. 

We talked about how groundhogs burrow to find a place to hibernate through the winter. We used our groundhogs and sand to burrow and hide.

We used our overhead this week to project shadows of different objects onto the wall. We hid our objects and took turns guessing them by looking at their shadows.

We also had flashlights, prisms, kaleidoscopes, and objects at this center for free play discovery! We not only talked about shadows this week, but also reflecting and refracting light  The kids were so impressed when they saw a rainbow appear using the prisms and flashlights. 

For a math center, we used our overhead and our bean manipulatives. The kids wrote a number on the overhead (backwards is better than not at all, right) and then counted that many beans and put them on the overhead so that they could see the projection on the wall and double-check their work by counting the shadows.

We had fun with these shoe box shadow boxes this week! We had different miniature animals that we put into our shadow box, and we took turns telling a story about our animals while our friends tried to guess the animal.

We practiced forming our lowercase alphabet by "shadowing" each letter with our wiki stix. They are a string covered in wax, so when you press on them, they stick to the letters and stay in place. These over sized letters from Lakeshore Learning are perfect for this because they show us the correct way to form our letters.

This memory game was perfect for our shadows week.  We matched each shape (in yellow) to its shadow in black.

And, we matched our lowercase alphabet to our uppercase alphabet with our lowercase alphabet boards, and our uppercase alphabet letters.

We each had some computer time this week playing shadow games. We had to drag the shadow to its match.

And, we also used our counting boards to match our numbers to their corresponding pictures.

Along with light and shadows, we also touched upon mirror images this week. We had fun cutting out shapes with 2 colors of construction paper to form our mirror image pictures. This was also great scissor practice!

Book of the week: Guess Whose Shadow by Stephen Swinburne

Words of the week: Hog and Dig

Song of the week: Do As I'm Doing

Star of the week:

We enjoyed learning about our star this week!

Bruce!!

and....

We celebrated a birthday!

Happy Birthday Madison!!!

Feelings and phone numbers

How are you feeling today? We talked about our feelings and families recently. It sure is hard to be 3 and 4 years old! So many emotions, and they change in a flash. But, thankfully, I get to see these cute kiddos have fun and be happy almost everyday! Love that about my job!

For this writing center, we took one of the cardboard people and wrote our name on it (or more than one if we were feeling more than one emotion) and stuck it in the box of the emotion we were feeling at the time. The mirror helped us act out those emotions. :)

We also had some emotions flashcards. We picked one out, and acted it out with the help of our emotion bears below.

Aubrey is happy, just like our orange happy bear. We also had a sad bear, angry bear, and scared bear.

We used these feelings stamps to show how we were feeling, like to feel, and how we like to make others feel. 

We also talked about our families this week. We had these wooden block families that we sorted into different families, including grandparents and pets.

And, speaking of families, we started talking about how words end with the same letters, also known as word families. Our spelling center had different 3 letter word families, using each of the vowels. 

We also talked about how their are families all around the world. We may look different, and do things differerntly, but we all have families that love us.

We learned a song this week to help us memorize our phone numbers. I sent the lyrics and phone numbers home with your children so that they can work on learning it. We also had a movie day this week in celebration of completing our assessments. Thank you to all you parents for coming to parent-teacher conferences, and for all of your support!