Presidents and Rockets

Our letter of the week this week was U. We had a fun hunt around our class for the letter U and hung all of the ones we found from our umbrella!

Since we didn't have school on Monday because of President's Day, we took some time on Wednesday to talk about why we celebrate President's Day. We learned about what a President is and a little about Washington and Lincoln. 

The kids always think it's so funny that Washington wore a wig, so they had lots of fun making his wig extra poofy! They also got to make their own Lincoln masks. (No, I have no idea why this picture insists on uploading sideways.)

On Friday we went back into outer space in a rocket! We watched a video of a rocket launch that this kids absolutely loved. We also pretended to be rockets and took the opportunity to work on counting backwards from ten. I love learning that feels like fun! We slipped in a little more learning by making rockets out of our names. The kids had to unscramble the letters of their name and glue it on the page in the right order. They were awesome at it!

More About the Moon and Valentine's Day

On Monday this week we finished learning about the moon by talking about the phases of the moon. 

We also talked about the letter T this week. You probably noticed a paper in your child's backpack that said "SEEL At Home". SEEL stands for Systematic, Engaging Early Literacy and is a program I love to use. You will be seeing activities from the program come home about once a week for the remainder of the year. Please take the time to do these with your child to reinforce what they are learning in class! If you would like more information about the SEEL program, please check out this website: http://education.byu.edu/seel/what_is_seel.html

We also had lots of fun with Valentine's Day this week! We used hearts to make a valentine's monster and to learn more about patterns! The kids had tons of fun making Valentine's gifts for their parents. The jars make cute candle holders, pencil holders, vases or anything else you can think of!

Sun and Moon

I love learning about the letter S and so do the kids! Learning the sound is super easy because we get to sound like snakes. They had lots of fun making snake sounds and finding words that start with S!

We also pulled out some new puzzles this week, which is also fun. Puzzles are so great for spacial reasoning and fine motor skills. If you're child isn't ready to put a puzzle together on their own yet, help them and let them just put the pieces together! I saw one student this week just taking one piece out at a time and then putting it back in. Though that doesn't seem productive, it's a great start!

On Friday we got to practice numbers some more and worked on identifying numerals. A few kids were even ready to start on 15-20!

Our group activities for the week started off with a lesson on Groundhog Day. We learned about making predictions and took a poll of our class and recorded our predictions on whether the groundhog would see his shadow. After that we got to watch the ceremony and look back at our predictions to see if we were right! Looks like we're in for more winter. I think I'm ok with that!

On Wednesday we started our outer space unit by learning about the sun. We watched the first few minutes of the Bill Nye episode about the sun. The kids loved it! If you would like to let your child watch the rest of the episode, you can find it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq-l65eEgjc . 

We also started a science experiment to research why we use sunscreen. The kids each made a picture with sunscreen and then we set them out in the sun. We'll leave them out for a few days and see what happens to the paper.

We also made sun catchers by drawing pictures and then poking holes along the lines with a toothpick. I hope your child got a chance to hang theirs in a window to show you!

On Friday we made some decorations for our classroom and practiced our scissor skills for cutting out stars.

We also started to talk about the moon. Since the moon is bumpy, we made bumpy paper plates and then covered them in tin foil so they look like the moon!

Rain Forest Animals

We learned  how to play a new game for centers this week! Alphabet Tic-Tac-Toe! Just like regular tic-tac-toe, except that in order to draw your X or O, you have to name the letter that is covering the space you want to use. I think we will be doing this again soon and maybe we will branch out and use other letters besides X and O to give us some practice writing.

Our group activities this week all focused on animals that live in the rain forest. It was fun to learn some of their crazy names and see all the beautiful colors of the rain forest!

On Monday we read "The Umbrella" by Jan Brett. It is just as good as all of her other books! In the story, a group of rain forest animals all float down a river in an upside down umbrella. So we painted animals and put them in our own umbrellas. I loved the things that the kids remembered from the story as they were working on this. Some even remembered where some of the animals were sitting in the umbrella.

We also practiced our counting with the Monkey Grid Game, following the same rules as the Reindeer Grid Game we played last month.

Wednesday was all about snakes! We read about different kinds of snakes and had fun looking for similarities and differences. We also made our own snakes out of cardboard tubes.

Friday was our field trip to the zoo! It was so much fun to see the animals that we've learned about! I have to say though, that I was pretty bummed that the coyotes weren't out, so next time you see a coyote running down the side of the street, make sure you point it out to your preschooler! (Maybe it's just me, put I see them pretty often!)

These were some of the kids' favorite Arizona animals. 

Did you get a chance to see the tiger?

Or these adorable monkeys?I love how close you can get to them!