Out of this world!

We talked about space this week. And, you cannot visit the moon, or outer space, without a rocket ship. So, we felt it appropriate to make some rocketships this week so that we could blast off into space! And, what great backwards countdown practice.....10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 BLASTOFF!

As we learned this week, we incorporated aspects of space. We made our room dark, and had glow in the dark stars surrounding us. We used our black lights and fluorescent markers to write our names so that they would glow-in-the-dark! We had a lot of fun with this!

And, we also wrote our names in the starry sky! This center was located in our empty closet. We had lots of stars on all of the walls, along with this glow-in-the-dark painted canvas. We used LED pens to write on the canvas, and our letters glowed, just like the stars!! I couldn't get good pictures in the dark, but if you look close you can see how the LED pens give the glow in the dark paint just enough light to make the letters glow.

We have been really focusing on our teens and the number 20 the last few weeks. Here we are painting a glow in the dark number 20 with our green and yellow glow in the dark paint. 

We talked about how we need to have special equipment to travel to space. We can't just take an ordinary airplane, or typical food, or plain clothing. For a dramatic play center, we had some spaceships, astronauts, and glow-in-the-dark play-dough. We made moons with craters out of the play-dough for the rockets to land.

We talked about how constellations are a group of stars that form a pattern, and how if we look closely at night, we can see some constellations. This center had some lite bright screens and pegs for us to make our own star constellations.

And, we found each letter of the alphabet in the stars! We matched our uppercase letters to their lowercase counterpart for this activity. We had all of the uppercase letters written on stars that were placed throughout the room, and then we used our finger flashlights to search for the letters and crossed the matching lowercase letter off of our clipboard.

We played with some day and night blocks in our block center. These blocks have pictures that show how to build the blocks by just looking at the shapes, and the colors are blacked out as if it is night time. They try to build them up by just seeing the shape, and then can check to see if they got it correct by seeing their blocks in color. There are many different types of these blocks made by Castle Logix, and they are so fun. We love them, and even my older kids will play them for hours. 

We practiced our motor skills this week by stringing some glow-in-the-dark beads onto strings for our own glow-in-the-dark necklace. 

We celebrated a birthday this last week.

Happy Birthday to our adorable Kyra!!

And, we enjoyed learning more about our first star of the week.....Kendrick! So fun!!

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!