Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day. It is such a fun holiday to celebrate at school!

We spent both Monday and Wednesday this week doing fun Valentine's activities. One of the favorites was our Valentine's monsters. They took us both days to put together and gave the kids practice in cutting, folding and gluing. They turned out super cute!

On Wednesday we celebrated Valentine's by decorating sugar cookies, making Valentine's for our Moms and Dads and had some fun with Valentine's patterns.

Friday was back to our regularly scheduled learning. We talked about things that start with the letter T. The kids are starting to be able to identify beginning sounds pretty well and are able to come up with a few words that start with our letter of the week without my help! This week we also practiced writing by copying some of the T words we talked about.

We also started talking about planets today. The kids all worked together to make a model of the solar system out of playdough. I love how tiny they made the first four plants. They were so fascinated with the sizes of the planets when we learned about them! They did a great job of representing that in their playdough. We also starting making flip books about the planets that will be coming home soon!

If you haven't done it yet, take some time to go out and look at the night sky with your child! See the newsletter for resources to help you identify the things you see.

Into Outer Space

This week was the start of our exploration into outer space. It has been so fun to learn about all those things up in the sky. I checked out tons of books on space from the library and the kids have been learning so much by just looking through them and asking me questions about the things they see. Aren't books amazing? You don't even need to be able to read to learn from a good book.

We started out close to home with the moon. We talked about the surface of the moon and then made our own bumpy moons by gluing pasta and beans onto paper plates and then covering them in foil.

This was one of my favorites!

We also talked about the phases of the moon and made flip books. It was some awesome practice in cutting, gluing and following directions. They all did such a great job.

On Wednesday we talked about the sun. We learned a little about how hot the sun is and how it affects us here on earth. For a little demonstration, we finger painted with sunscreen! After our papers sat outside for a few days, the sun faded the areas of the paper that weren't covered in sunscreen.

We also got in some fine motor skill practice making sun catchers. The students drew pictures on their papers and then used a toothpick to poke holes along the lines of their pictures.

When they're hung on the window, we could see the sun shining through the holes!

On Friday we were able to start learning to skip count. This is something that we already do everyday during calendar, so the kids caught on really fast. We made piles of 10 beans and then used skip counting to find out how many we had. We also had some practice trying to write the numbers we use when counting by 10.

We then continued our exploration with the stars. We talked about what stars are and then learned about constellations. We read a couple books that told us stories of some of the constellations and used the iPad to look at the constellations that were in the sky at that time.

One of the constellations we learned about was Pegasus, so we made a magic trick to take home to help us remember the story of Pegasus. The kids also got to use their creativity to make their own constellations. They came up with some great ideas! We had a house, a truck and a scorpion, just to name a few!

Remember to send Valentines and something for the kids to collect their Valentines in to school tomorrow. We can't wait for our Valentine's day party!

Boats and Groundhog Day

On the last day of our transportation unit, we talked about boats. We had a great time with this activity. We learned about halves as the kids folded each shape in half and then put them together to make a boat!

Friday, we brought back a favorite center that hasn't been done for a while. We played charades! We made a list of words that start with R and then the kids took turns acting them out and letting the other kids guess which word they had picked.

We also got to learn about Groundhog Day! We started out with a scavenger hunt to find our snack. Each clue told a fact about groundhogs and gave the kids a task (eating a vegetable like a ground hog, trying to whistle like a groundhog, etc.), at the end, they found a groundhog waiting for them to eat!

Curious George helped us learn a little more about Groundhog Day as we watched a clip from the episode "Whistlepig Wednesday". The kids loved to see the groundhog doing the things we had just learned about in the scavenger hunt. To finish our day, we made our own groundhogs peaking out of the ground and made our own predictions as the whether he would see his shadow!

All About Airplanes

Apparently the letter Q is a popular letter among our students. They were very excited to learn about it and many of them already knew quite a few words that start with Q!

For centers this week we brought out a fun new game. The students were put into teams and raced to see which team could match their tiles to the letters on the paper the fastest. They all did a great job at matching, working together and being good sports! I love how much can be learned from games.

Our mode of transportation for the week was airplanes. The kids did a great job painting their popsicle stick airplanes and we got some practice with gross motor skills and taking turns with airplane relay races.

At the end of the day on Friday, the kids lined the chairs up and pretended to be on an airplane, a race car and a train. They made all the noises and pretended to drive, we even had some backseat driving going on. They put their imaginations to work thinking up new places to go. Some of the most popular destinations were the North Pole, grandma's house and California. We had a momentary halt to the fun when the train broke down, but the kids pulled out their tools and had it fixed in no time! (No, that's not code for anything. They just told me that the train had broken down and they were fixing it!)

Trains, Trains and More Trains

This week was all about trains (and of course, the letter P and the color yellow).

We had lots of fun with P words during centers time. We played with puzzles, pigs and of course, lots of pink and purple.

We learned all about the parts of a train this week. We read lots of books and pulled out the toys trains and rug to explore. We also got to make some of our own trains! I was so impressed with how well all the students did with their train puzzles (pictured below), they were all able to complete it independently! It was fun to watch the different approaches as some kids laid everything out and then started gluing and other put the glue on a piece and then tried to figure out where to put it. 

We also practiced graphing again (we did this once before during our weather unit). It's a tough concept and one that is great practice! We also added a sheet of questions about the graph, that unfortunately we didn't have time to complete. A great way to help your child learn is to ask them questions about things that this that come home from preschool. It helps them to think back and remember what we learned and you can always take the opportunity to expand what we have already talked about!

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a marvelous Christmas and New Years. It was fun to have some time with family, but it's also been nice to get back into the swing of things this week! 

Our letter of the week this week was O. I love O week because the kids already know it, which leaves us time to expand that knowledge further and do some fun activities with it! The kids were able to find all kinds of words around our classroom that had the letter O in them (at the beginning middle and end) and we had fun learning about a couple of O animals, ostriches and octopuses. Today the kids each made their own toilet paper tube octopus.(Thank you for all the donations!)

We also started our Transportation unit. This week we talked about cars and trucks. We learned about Semi-trucks, bulldozers, cement mixers, dump trucks, monster trucks and race cars. Today in class we made our own race cars and had tons of fun racing them!

(Sorry, I can't get the picture to load the right direction!)

We have also been doing all kinds of new things during centers this week! We have started to work on writing our last names. We have also been doing a lot of sorting this week. This semester we are going to be doing a lot of activities to help the kids with things that preschoolers commonly get mixed up (3 & 5, b & d, etc)

Brazil, Australia and the USA

I don't think I can really express how much I have loved having your kids in my home this Christmas season. I have loved seeing their excitement and the kindness and Christmas spirit that they bring with them every day!

On Monday we traveled to Brazil. They have some amazing Christmas displays in Brazil: huge trees and beautiful nativities. Families in Brazil frequently make their own nativities. Some of these, and some of the nativities displayed around the country, are made out of recycled products. So, we made our own recycled nativities!

On Wednesday we visited Australia. Christmas in Australia is very similar to Christmas here, with one big difference, it's summer and school is just getting out for summer break! The kids were very confused by this concept. In Australia, Christmas involves swimming in the ocean, barbecues and sandmen instead of snowmen! We had lots of fun making our own sandmen!

By Friday, our Grinch was filled with the kind acts that the kids have done this month. This is just a sample, I definitely didn't catch all of them! (These hearts will be coming home in January, I apologize for not getting them into suitcases today!) This meant that today we got to have a Christmas party!

We rounded out our travels with the USA. We talked about what we do for Christmas in our families and then did some of those activities! We had a great time painting, playing games, singing carols and reading stories. For snack time, we made our own Christmas wreaths that were very tasty. 

Have a wonderful break and I will see you all in January!