Give Thanks!

Hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving! We had fun learning about all things Thanksgiving too! We made these cute thumbprint turkeys in honor of the big bird! (inspired by pinterest, of course)

We had some great fine motor practice with this pumpkin weaving project. 

We have almost spent solo time on each letter of the alphabet! Here we are building our letter puzzles for all of the letters we have learned thus far.

We colored a page for our memory books. You will get a kick, and be proud, of what things that your children told me they are thankful for!

We talked about the background of Thanksgiving, and why we celebrate. We talked about the Mayflower boat, and how the pilgrims traveled over on one, and how the Indians and Pilgrims became friends. For this center, we were the wind that the pilgrims had to battle, and we helped our boats move back and forth over the water.

We made our own cornmeal using our grinding rocks and corn (corn nuts). They could not get enough of this! Find them the right job, and they are happy to do it!

For a math center, we practiced recognizing our numbers, by sight, up to number 13. We put the number of leaves on the tree branch that matched that number, and then dropped them down to the ground, just like they do in the fall.

I am truly thankful for the opportunity that I have to be a tiny part of your children's life! I love them so much and am so thankful for the smiles and great mood that they put me in each day! Thank you for giving me the joy to teach and love them!

Field trip to Home Depot

We live in Utah, so we are all very familiar with these orange and reflective yellow vests! Now, your kids know why they are worn, and what some of the jobs are that construction workers do around the town.

We also talked about road signs, and what some of them mean and how we can follow them.

We like to build just as construction workers do, and your kids are great at it! Here they are using their imaginations to build with our magnetic building Magformers.

We also used our fine motor skills to use our screw drivers and built up some transportation vehicles. 

For a math center, we had fun with hammers and nails. We rolled the die, counted the number it landed on, and hammered that many nails (golf tees) into our foam squares. 

And, our writing center was CAUTION tape writing. We traced the letters in the word caution with our tracing paper.

And, just like most construction workers, we played in the dirt!

We're ready for our field trip to Home Depot! We can't wait to see the supplies and tools that are used to build our homes and other structures.

AND

we had a great time at Home Depot touring their store and earning a pin and certificate by building our own craft! Thank you Home Depot for taking such great care of us! Just a reminder for you parents....I will be getting their aprons as soon as they come in, and every first Saturday of the month you can visit their store to do a craft and earn another pin.

Farm animals

E-I-E-I-O, were just some of the letters we talked about this week. :) We also talked about the letters O and P. Do you like our letter O, owl craft? I think they turned out "O" so cute! We also made a farm animal counting book, practicing our number recognition skills to number 7. Read and count this book with your kids often and really emphasize what those numbers look like. They have the counting part down, but number by sight recognition is really what the focus of this book is.

You can't talk about farm animals without having a barn, and yes, many farm animals! We enjoyed dramatic play with farm animal figurines and puppets.

I just love Peyton in this picture below, look how she is riding her horsey. Yeehaw!

For our reading center, we had some I Spy Farm Animal books and we worked hard to find all of the farm animals and farm items on each page.

We also talked about the penny this week for letter P. For a math center we then used our pennies to fill up our piggies with the correct number that each pig had written on their belly.

We are also starting to get more into addition, aside from just counting and number recognition. Here in our Add-a-frog center, you can see how we add by physically placing that number of frogs into our tray. We then took our dry erase crayons and wrote the number total on the line provided. This math center was bought from Lakeshore Learning.

We also took turns playing uno moo. Great for color recognition, counting, animal recognition, and some fun!!

We practiced writing our alphabet with these alphabet writing mats.

We also talked about farmers, farm animals, and how much work it is to work and live on a farm. These cards below are matching cards where you match the baby animal to its mama. They got so fast at doing it by plain sight, that they made it into a memory game.

Here are some more farm animal puzzles.

Ta-da!

We made our own farm scene pictures with our dot markers. 

And, of course, we had to have our milking station center. This is one that the kids absolutely love! I fill some gloves with water and then put a hole in the fingertips, and we squeeze them as though we are milking a cow. It works wonderfully and the kids just think it it great!

Songs of the week: Old MacDonald Had a Farm

and 

Counting to 20

Words of the week: pig and pop. 

When we spell our words, I really enunciate the letter sounds and we practice writing each letter in correct form.