Our 5 senses!

We learned about 3 of our 5 senses last week......taste, smell, and sight.  We had a lot of fun with taste and smell.  We each ate a few skittles one at a time with our eyes closed and tried to guess what flavor they were.  On the last one, we smelled it before we ate it, and it helped us to guess the right flavor.  We talked about the four main tastes: salty, bitter, sweet, and sour. 

We played with playdough that smelled like pumpkin pie.

We had jars filled with some different scents and tried to see if we could find the two that matched each other.  We smelled onions, cinnamon, vanilla, and oranges just to name a few.

We made a sunflower for our craft.  We talked about how these flowers are pretty special because not only do they smell good, but we can eat a part of them too....the seeds!

Paige is making a puzzle here that has one of the letters of the alphabet on it.  We are really getting good at recognizing our letters.  I know that we have not yet spent of ton of time writing the letters, but we will do a lot of that the last half of the year.  Knowing what the letters look like, what sound they make, and how we make the letters (from top to bottom, left to right) ect. will make it a lot easier for your kids to write their letters and write them correctly. 

And, we finished off our day of learning about taste and smell with none other than tasting and smelling delicious snicker doodle cookies!!

The following day we talked about our sight.  We talked about the letter N this day, so one of our centers for sight was near and far. 

We used these magnifying glasses to search different things around the room.  We had a lot of fun with this.

We also made pictures with our black scratch paper.  At first the children were only able to see a blank black sheet of paper, but as they drew their pictures, they saw every color of the rainbow.

The children practiced their letter recognition by finding and placing matching letters on their letter board.  They could either match identically (uppercase to uppercase) or lowercase with its uppercase.  As you can see, they did a great job.

We practiced writing our names.

And for our art project, we did bubble art.  The children took straws and blew bubbles as big as they could get them and then I scooped them up and we squirted some food coloring of their choice onto their bubbles. As the bubbles popped, voila, bubble art!

We learned a song called Colored Leaves this week.  Here are the words:

Colored Leaves

So many leaves are falling on the ground.
Orange ones, yellow ones, and even brown.
But the one little leaf that rhymes with bean
Is my favorite color, it’s the color green.

So many leaves are falling on the ground.
Orange ones, yellow ones, and even brown.
But the one little leaf that rhymes with fellow
Is my favorite color, it’s the color yellow.

So many leaves are falling on the ground.
Orange ones, yellow ones, and even brown.
But the one little leaf that rhymes with bed
Is my favorite color, it’s the color red.


Stayed tuned to hear about touch and hearing next week!!

Halloween week!

We had a lot of fun the week of halloween.  We learned about the letters K and L.  Leo the lion (puppet) visited this week and was HUNGRY.  He only wanted to eat letters so we reviewed our letters and fed them to Leo and as he chewed he made the sound that the letter made.  We worked on the number 8 this week, so what better to make than eight-legged spiders to hang as Halloween decor!

We sang "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" to go along with our theme.

We also had some fun magnetic mazes where the children led a paperclip to the end of the maze with a magnet on the back of the paper.  The kids loved this activity. 

We practiced our counting with our monkey math links.

Each monkey has a different number on it and the children add the appropiate amount of links to match each number.

One of our art projects this week was a fall tree where the kids added colored leaves (popcorn) to their paper either on their tree, or at the bottom as if the leaves had already fallen.

I forgot to take pictures so the one on the left is by my 7 year old who has been off-track.  Pretty detailed for a preschooler.  The one on the left is more like it. :)

We also had a great time at our Halloween party!!  Your kids all looked so great in their costumes.  The first game we played was during circle time and we each passed a pumpkin around to Halloween music until the music stopped.  When it stopped, the children were allowed to find one treat in the pumpkin brains (spaghetti noodles) before the pumpkin was passed around again.  This was very funny to watch the children's faces as they dug in the noodles.  A couple of kids had their friends help because they weren't about to touch whatever was in there. :)

We also played a skeleton relay race, pumkin bean bag toss, an eye-ball (ping pong ball) spoon relay, and we decorated rice krispie treat pumpkins for a snack.  While we ate snack we watched the movie "The Great Pumpkin" with Charlie Brown and we ended a great day by collecting treats from our friends! 

I hope everyone had a great party and a Happy Halloween!   Thanks for the treats everyone!!

And, also a very Happy Birthday to Evy and Mark this week!

This is the picture of Mark while we were singing to him.  He was very shy while we were singing, but gave us a BIG smile after we were done!

October 20th and 21st

Along with going to the farm, we were able to take a nature walk last week (which I am so glad we did because now there is snow!).  We walked around the block and looked for things found in nature on the way.  We admired the changing leaves, listened to the birds, and counted the colorful flowers.  We also found our shadows! We found some pinecones that we made into bird feeders when we got back. 
When we got back to the preschool, we continued to talk about shadows and what makes a shadow, and we played with flashlights to create our own shadow pictures. 

We also make pumpkin sun catchers to hang in our windows.

And, we did dot art to count to 7.

We learned about the letter J this week and learned the song 5 Little Pumpkins.

5 Little Pumpkins

5 Little Pumpkins sitting on a gate

 The first one says "Oh my it's getting late!

Second one said "there are witches in the air"
the 3rd one said "but we don't care"
The 4th one said "let's run, and run, and run"
The 5th one said "I'm ready for some fun"

OO-Oo went the wind

And out went the light (clap on 'out' )

And the 5 little pumpkins rolled out of sight!

Wheeler Farm!

We had a great time on our field trip to the farm. Here are some pictures (in no particular order) that captured our adventure:

Thanks for coming everyone!