Winter time!

Hey there! I hope that everyone had a great holiday, and I apologize for  the long break on the blog! December went so quick with Thanksgiving being late this year, and my computer crashed this month! But, my wonderful husband bought me a new one so I shouldn't have any more problems!  And, I will make sure that all of the cute pictures of your kiddos get added to the year end slide show!

We talked about winter, and polar animals last week. We talked about the type of clothes we would need to wear if we visited the arctic.  We would need to dress very warm, just like our cute Eskimos are wearing below! I found this cute craft pattern here.

We learned about penguins, and for a math center, we fed penguins fish. Each penguin had a number on its belly, and we fed each penguin that number of Swedish fish. Then, we practiced counting to 10 on ourselves and fed ourselves 10 Swedish fish.

We also talked about how penguins have a layer of fat on them called blubber. Blubber helps protect them for the cold climate that they live in. We experimented with this by first sticking our fingers in ice cold water. We then put a layer of fat on them (crisco) and stuck them in the ice cold water again to see if it helped. The kids really enjoyed this because it was like a magic trick for them, they were amazed that it actually helped!

We talked about how when penguins lay their eggs, the dads take care of the eggs while the moms travel to gather food. We tried walking like penguins without our eggs falling off of our feet.

And, when you talk about the arctic, you can't forget polar bears! Polar bears have 2 types of fur that helps keep them warm, so we made sure our bears had plenty of fur too. We used coconut flakes to add just the right amount of fur to them.

 

And, where there is cold, there is often times snow! We used our marshmallow snowballs to trace our letters this week. The kids had to trace their letters, and then show me before they could eat the snow.

For some fine motor practice, we sorted our snowballs this week with our tweezers. We practiced some math too! We rolled the die, and transfered that many snowballs from one container to the other. We used our timers to see how fast we could transfer them.

We had fun playing Don't Break the Ice. We did break the ice though, many times, so we had some fun using our motor skills to put the game back together. And even more fun knocking them back down again.

We fished for numbers. The kids are getting great at their number recognition, especially numbers 1 to 10!

And, we did even more fishing with our water table, fish and poles. We had fun catchcing these sneaky little guys.

We had some writing practice this week with our magnetic writing boards. We pretended that the board was a wall of ice, and we practiced carving our names in the ice.

More letter review with our pop and write letter boards. It was a race to see what letter would get to the finish line first. Which letter will win?

And, for fun we made some igloos out of cups.

During circle time, we made letters with our long straight and curvy lines. After we made the letter D, I told them to peek through the letter. Peek-a-boo!

We have started our "Star of the week". Watch for a note to come home each week to see when it is your child's turn to shine!

Gale Center Museum field trip

We learned about our home state this week, the Beehive State, Utah. We were excited to learn about where we live, and even more excited to visit the Gale Center Museum for our field trip!

We traced the shape of Utah with our toothpick dot art. This was a center that the children visited. Sometimes they leave their work in the preschool room, and I am not always sure who it belongs to, but every child had some practice with the shape of the state, along with the letters in its name.

We recite the pledge of allegiance every morning. We also talk about how many stars are on the flag, and why. Here we had an interactive map that named the 50 states as we touched them, so your children became somewhat familiar with where Utah is located in the United States. 

We also had a globe that the children looked at, and this puzzle of the world they worked on.

This week was our first introduction to money. This week I simply let the kids play with the money and do their own exploration of what things they found as they looked at it. This giant sized money was a great way for them to see what is on each of the coins and bills. We will continue to talk about currency and what the coins are each called and what they are worth.

We talked about some of the things that Utah is famous for, like National Parks. We had a memory match up game with many of the national parks of Utah.

This center was filled with moon dough, which is flour with oil added to make it mold able, along with some trucks and construction workers. We talked about what materials are mined at Kennocott, and how it is big enough to see from space! 

And, our week ended with a fun trip to the Gale Center Museum. This is a great little museum with some fun interactive hands-on learning stations where the kids learned about the cultures of Utah. They had a lot of fun, as you will surely see from their big smiles on their faces!

We can't wait to go again!