Bugs

We started our bug week off by reading about the Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We read how he was very hungry, and got even more hungry as the week went on. He ate until he was nice and plump and tired. He then took a nap, and woke up as a beautiful butterfly. We made our own hungry caterpillars below, each caterpillar the length of the letters in our name. 

And, caterpillars were just one of the many insects we talked about this week. At our discovery center, we had many  real (but not live) different bugs to come take a look at with our magnifying glasses. We also used our scooping tweezers to scoop some bugs into our bug catchers. We caught some bees, ants, grasshoppers, and ladybugs.

We used or regular tweezers to catch some bed bugs from the old man's bed. Great fine motor skills! And, there isn't much worse than bed bugs, right!?

This stack a bug game is played like Jenga. They stacked their bugs 3 deep and about 15 tall, and took turns rolling the die which told them what color they had to choose. They had fun squirming out their bugs........

and sometimes watching them fall!

For our math center, we played with our ring spiders! We rolled the die, and added that many spider rings to our fingers. We did this until each finger had at least one spider on it. 

Our reading center was full of stories about bugs, and we had our ladybug and spider beanbags to join us! Above this center, it said "Don't bug us, we're reading". :)

We did some bug sorting with these pattern mats and colored bugs. We sorted according to bug type, color, and different AB, AABB patterns.

Got Cooties? Who can build a bug first? We rolled the die and counted the dots to see! Each number was associated with a body part of the bug!

We had a some color recognition fun with this snail racing game. The kids used teamwork to see what snail could race to the finish first. They rolled two dice, and whatever color they landed on, those two snails would move one space forward. May the best snail win!

We brushed up on our 1-10 number recognition with these bug counting puzzles!

Bug lacing card fun!

We practiced our -ug rhming words. We had words like hug, bug, tug, slug, and rug. You can print these up at kidssoup.com

These ladybug puzzles went from A-Z, and they matched up by matching our uppercase to our lowercase alphabet. 

Our stars of the week:

This super cute girl named

Eliza!

And, a Happy 5th Birthday to our friend Kara!

and this stud Dominic!

Concepts of time

   This week we worked on the concept of time. It is such a confusing concept, with minutes and seconds and hours and days, weeks, months, before, after, during and so forth and so on! :) But, we stuck with the basics, and started with just showing that there are the numbers 1 through 12 on a clock. We used this giant clock and bean bags to try to make a shot in each number in order! 

We used our scissors and made our own paper clocks for a center this week too. Again, I wanted to emphasize the twelve numbers on the clock, as well as the big hand and the little hand. 

We discussed how there are 24 hours in a day, and talked about how the big hand is on the 12 whenever a new hour strikes. We then used our flashcards to practice. We picked a card, and leaving the big hand on the 12, we moved our little hand to one o'clock, two o'clock and so forth. Great number recognitioin practice and basic clock conception.  

The next day during circle time, I named an hour of day, and the kids turned their clocks to that hour!

For some writing practice, we used our hula hoop and made another giant clock on our white board. The kids filled in the blank numbers of 1 through 12.

We had letter review practice with our A-Z letter puzzles.

And, built our letters with our long straight lines, short straight lines, long curvy lines, and short curvy lines.

Along with the concept of time, we timed out how long a minute is, and played our own version of minute to win it. We had different obstacles that we had to pass off in a minute or less, such as sorting a bunch of colored items into the correct color of crayon, and adding the shape pegs to their correct shaped board.

We also learned a song about the days of the week, and made these flashcards to help us remember the order of the days from 1 to 7.

Our star of the week this week:

Sam I am!!