Johnny Appleseed

Sorry about the insanity this week! Hopefully we've all had our sickness for this season and will be more healthy from now on. We've been doing some serious sanitizing around here!

On Wednesday this week we celebrated Johnny Appleseed's birthday. We watching the Disney short movie about Johnny Appleseed to learn a little bit about him and then had lots of fun with apples!

We did our learning that day with apple patterns and counting apples!

(For some reason this picture doesn't want to load the other direction.)

For snack time we did an apple tasting. We tried fresh apples, dried apples and applesauce. It was fun to talk how many different ways we eat apples!

We also had some fun with painting our own apple trees.

On Friday we had a little fun since we didn't get to go on our field trip. (Still working on rescheduling, I will get the info to you asap!)

We made a fun chicken craft, watched Curious George do some chores on the farm and played this fun shape game!

I love games like this that are so fun for the kids, but they are learning as they play. It is a great way to talk about shapes and it also helps their spacial reasoning as they decide which shapes they will need to complete their picture.

Animals on the Farm

This week we have talked a lot about the animals that can be found on the farm (and finished up plants, that rainy day really threw off my groove). 

We spent some time playing with the toy farm and talking about where on the farm each animal lives and what they do. We then made our own farm animals out of playdough!

We also talked about biggest and smallest this week with the animals on the farm. 

On Wednesday we got to play Uno Moo! If you don't play board games/card games at home, start now! They are great for teaching kids to play together and to follow rules and procedures. 

We also played a matching game!

Our letter this week was E. The kids did a great job at writing the letter E and finding things that start with the letter E!

On Friday we learned about patterns. We followed some patterns that had already been made and then the kids got a chance to make their own patterns. The kids all understood the concept and did follow a pattern as they picked up the colored squares. However, gluing them down in a way that properly reflected that pattern turned out to be more difficult. 

Down on the Farm

I apologize for the lack of a blog post last week. Time definitely got away from me. I didn't even take any pictures last week!

We learned about the letter C last week with hunting for things that start with C and for the letter C itself, making letters out of playdough and a letter C maze. We spent a lot of our whole group time working on our Grandparent's Day gifts. If you haven't had a chance to deliver those to the grandparents, please help your child do that! We also introduced our September unit, "Down on the Farm".

This week, we have been talking about the plants that grow on a farm. I wanted to start the week off by planting our own seeds, but since it looked like this on Monday....

I had to change our plans. Planting seeds in the pouring rain just didn't seem like the best plan!

Instead we learned about how seeds grow and made pictures with corn seeds.

It was sunny and beautiful on Wednesday, so we got a chance to plant our seeds. Each child planted their own basil seeds in a cup. Those will be coming home at the end of the month. We also planted a class garden with carrot seeds. Keep your fingers crossed for us that we'll actually get something to grow!

Friday was one of my favorite days in this unit, The Little Red Hen day! We read the story of The Little Red Hen and then did all the same things she did in the story! With the exception of cutting and threshing the wheat. :) We ground our own wheat into flour and made it into rolls. The kids were definitely not like the animals in the story, they were super good helpers! We made the dough together and then each child got their own ball of dough to knead and form into rolls. We also made homemade butter to go with our rolls and may have had a little dance party to help us shake the cream to turn it into butter.

I love how fascinating simple things (like cooking rolls) are when you're young!

Of course, we also took some time for academics this week. We learned about the letter D and the number 3. As we read our Animal Antics book ("Dilly Dog's Dizzy Dancing) and looked through it for the letter D, I was very impressed that the kids are already starting to pick out the letter when it at the end or in the middle of the word!

On Friday we played a game with toy cars. There were groupings of cars around the room. Each child had a sheet of stickers and went around the room placing stickers by each group that had three cars in it. One student even started rearranging the groups so that they all had three. It was awesome!