Thanksgiving

This week we talked about all the things that we are thankful for.  You will like your children's answers :)  I wrote them down on a leaf cutout and will hand them out with the scrapbook at the end of the year.  We also talked about size comparisons this week.  We read a big book (literally, it is 3 feet by 2 feet!) talking about big and small things, and then we compared sizes with a game shown in the center below:

We also set the table for Thanksgiving dinner and had our own little feast.  The children were great at sharing and loved cooking for each other.

We also practiced our letter R this week.  I wrote some 'R's on the table and covered it with shelving paper (can't think of the name right now) and the kids were allowed to color on the table for a day.  Of course, they were very happy to do so as you see below:

We also talked some more about coins.  We have now been introduced to each of the coins, so the children had a veggie tray with all of the coins mixed up in the middle tray and had to sort them by coin in the different trays.  They may not remember the each of the names or the values so much, but even to have them differentiate between the different coins is a good start.  They remember more than we think though, we all know that from experience! 

And, you can't talk about Thanksgiving without giving the good ol' turkey some of the spotlight, so we each made our own turkey out of pumpkin and leaf cutouts. 

The Monday-Wednesday class had one extra day this week, and we talked about families.  We each named the members of our family and made popsicle stick puppets for each member.  We also talked some more about Thanksgiving dinner and how much time it takes to prepare (like growing the vegetables in advance).  We each cut pictures out of magazines and glued them to our "grocery list".  The children had some interesting finds for Thanksgiving feasting (a lot of goodies!).

I am surely grateful for all of your wonderful children and the time that I get to spend with them!  They mean so much to me.  I am thankful for my job and the opportunity that each of you give me to inspire, teach, and love your children!

P.S. Happy Birthday to Kylie this week!

Pilgrims and Indians

This week we had fun learning about why we celebrate Thanksgiving.  We talked about the letters P, and Q.  The day we talked about the letter P, we also talked about the pilgrims.  We talked about how they decided to leave their country for religious freedom and a better life and traveled by a boat called the Mayflower to come to the United States.

         We talked about what they wore and made our own pilgrim hats.

We talked about how it took a long time for them to travel, and we also talked about wind and how the pilgrims had to depend on the wind to get where they wanted to go.  They were the wind helping the boats travel.

                                           We colored pictures of the pilgrims.

We also made pinwheels that we took outside and watched them go around and around with the wind.

We also talked about the letter Q this week.  We continued to talk about coins, and talked about the dime and the quarter. 

And, we can't forget the Indians when talking about Thanksgiving.  We talked about how they helped the Pilgrims and showed them how to grow food. 

                                                  We made our own Indian corn.

And, to practice our letter Q, we used "cookies" (cookie crisp) and traced the letter on our cookie sheet to bake in the oven and then ate our "warm" cookies afterwards.

We also practiced our numbers with our number tree.  We placed the correct amount of leaves on each branch according to the number it called for, and then once the tree was full of leaves, we pretended to be the wind in the fall and made all of the leaves fall to the ground.
And, we also made Indian vests and headbands to take home to tell our families about the Indians.  We sang the Ten Little Indians song.

                                         Happy Birthday to Paige this week!

We also learned a song this week called the Number Rock.  It is one we will sing at our program and in it we count from 1-20!

5 senses continued........

We learned about the last 2 of the 5 senses this week.....touch and hearing.

We had some bags filled with different objects that we had to stick our hands in and try to find the matches by just feeling....no peeking allowed.

We learned about the letter 'O' this week.  We had fun with an O ring toss and making our cheerio O's.

We also learned about the penny and the nickel.  Here we are counting our pennies.

We learned about different textures this week.  The textures we talked about were soft, hard, smooth, rough, squishy and bumpy.

For some of our hearing object lessons, we had containers filled with different materials (rice, corn kernals, beans) and listened to the different sounds each made.

We also listened to story readers. Who doesn't love to read (and hear) a good book!

And, we made these wonderful quacking ducks!  (I know you love them :))

To make them quack, just dampen the sponge with water, and run the sponge down the string.

We also played with Mr. Potato head and friends.  We have now finished our five senses and what better than to give Mr. Potato all of his parts.....eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, nose for smelling, mouth for tasting, and hands for touching!

We learned our days of the week song this week.  We will begin practicing our program next week, so watch for your child's part to come home and please help them start to memorize their line. Thanks!!

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!