Thanksgiving Shows & Families

Both AM & PM classes did great in their little turkey shows.  It was a wonderful day filled with our family and friends.  We did not get any pictures without kid faces, so I can't post any of their performances on our blog.  Sorry about that!  We are so grateful for our terrific families!

Getting Ready for Our Feast

We are getting very excited for our Thanksgiving Shows and Family Feasts!  We have been busy preparing food for our families, making headbands to wear, and creating some cute turkey centerpieces.  It will be a fun day for our kids and families!

 

Making muffins!  The AM made cornbread to share and PM made pumpkin muffins.

 

Fruit Kabobs!

 

Headbands and centerpieces!

Turkey Circle Time

Here are just a few of our Circle Time activities for this unit.  We practiced our Thanksgiving Show songs, read silly stories, played "Who Stole the Turkey?", and learning about cornucopias with plastic fruit and veggies.

Turkey Games and Activities

Busy, Busy, Busy doing all things Turkey for our Thanksgiving Unit.  The AM Class' favorite activities were cranberries in the water table and "feeding the turkey" pom poms.  Several kids were amazed that no matter how hard they tried, those cranberries would not sink!  The PM Class' favorite activities were picking corn kernals off an Indian Corn cob with tweezers and the Roll & Draw a Turkey.  To make our turkey drawing, we had to roll a dice and then follow a chart to figure out which body part we needed to draw next.  Some of turkeys were very creative and colorful.

Barefoot Books Family Night

Wow!  We had an amazing night at Barefoot Books and it was such a fantastic turn out of our families!  It was so nice to see so many current and former students come to support us and to have fun.  The craft tables were " buzzing" with activity and the stories had several captive audiences.  Thank you to all our wonderful parents who helped organize and plan the event and those who donated supplies or food.  The children were most appreciative of the snacks.  THANK YOU FAMILIES!

Rhythm Kids Videos

Here are the videos I promised.  So much fun.  Enjoy.

 

Rhythm Kids program

We had a most amazing day today.  Rhythm Kids came to our school and we had a complete blast playing drums, dancing, moving to beats and rhythms, and hearing Tom and Dan play various instruments to tell a story about going on a trip to Africa.  Below are a few pictures. Videos will follow tomorrow!

Turkey Trot!

Despite the rain and the chill in the air, our turkey arrived and was ready to chase.  It all began with Mrs. Sumner announcing that she saw some turkey tail feathers outside.  We went out our door and there were feathers EVERYWHERE!  We had a grand time collecting them as we followed the trail into the Ripley Building.  As we walked down the hallway, out popped the giant turkey!  We chased that turkey to the end of the hallway and guess who it was?  Ms. B dressed in a purple feather cape and a silly mask.  We followed that turkey around the offices "gobbling" and shaking our tail feathers, while wishing everyone a "Happy Thanksgiving!"  After we made our rounds, we made a giant circle and did the Chicken Dance for all of the Ripley grown ups.  A fun way to kick off the season!

Face Rice Cake Faces

To end our very short week due to Veterans Day and conferences day, we made faces with rice cakes and all kinds of fruits and vegetables.  Each child got to choose to start with spreading either applesauce or cream cheese onto their rice cake.  Then we started at the top by choosing items to make hair, then eyes, noses, mouths and ears.  Then the best part came - eating our faces!

Body and Senses Circle Time

We were able to capture a couple of circle time activities without our little friends faces in them! Please bear with Mrs. Hill and I as we continue to learn how to work our photo magic.  We played a Listening Game where we heard sounds playing on the tape player and had to guess what they were. We played Body Twister with some unusual parts to spin. We changed the body parts on the spinner each day to such things as ears, noses, elbows, toes, etc.  This definitely kept us laughing and giggling.  A Sorting Senses Game had us picking items out of a box and then deciding which sense it best belonged in.  The little plastic skunk DEFINITLEY belonged in the smell category!  Mrs. Bailey, the speech pathologist, played a really great game during language group this week.  We rolled a large dice to see if it came up with eyes, ear, or a hand.  If you rolled a hand, you got to reach in a bag to feel an item and try to figure out what it was. If you rolled an ear, you listened to a sound and if you rolled eyes, your had to guess what the picture was small parts at a time.

More Body, Our 5 Senses, and Feelings

In addition to learning about our bodies, we also are discovering our senses and feelings.  We went fishing for feelings and sorted the faces.  We used a screen board (rough) and squiggle pens to make drawings.  We reached into feely cups to figure out what was hiding inside and matched letter tiles to pictures of our body parts that sense things.  A favorite activity was the colored foam in the water table.  Mrs. D re-purposed foamed soap dispensers to make the fun foam.  We also worked on counting by rolling a dice and placing marshmallow teeth in the mouth cards and by counting pipe cleaner rings to put on foam hand fingers.  Not pictured was a sound matching game where we had to shake hollow wooden blocks and match the two that sounded alike.

Body Games & Activities

We have been busy, busy, busy learning about our bodies.  For our older ones, body bingo was played with blending sounds (f+ing+er= finger) or by listening to clues to figure out "What am I?".  We made playdough people and also lips with beans for teeth.  For other strong hands activities, we followed paths, traced Mat Man pictures, and used teenie tiny clothes pins to match numbers after counting hands.  We made lots of Potato Heads and played a Make a Potato Head game with a spinner (no picture).  One of the favorite activities was giving our babies a bath and practicing diapering them.

Mat Man

To begin our unit on the body and all about me, we started with Mat Man. Ms. Balmuth, our OT, giving us a lesson on how to draw and make people.  Man Man is part of the Handwriting Without Tears program that we use in preschool and that the elementary schools use to teach handwriting.  The kids learned that we always start from the top!  After the lesson, we all got down on the floor and started making Mat Men with a baggie full of pieces!

Big Pumpkin Story

Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman is another Mrs. D favorite.  We read the story and listened to the CD and after we knew the story, we acted it out with fun hat props.  You can listen to the story below.

Halloween Fun!

We had a day filled with costumes, silliness & fun, special stories, lots of Halloween games, Trick or Treating in the administration building, and great snacks!  We finished our day with some fun Halloween brain pop dance videos and a flying ghost balloon experiment.  Thank you to all our parents who volunteered and sent in special snack goodies.

Icey Hands!

In our water table today were ice hands, colored ice cubes, and spider ice cubes.  We had fun playing in the cold water and watching the ice melt.  The water was a brownish color when everything finally melted.

Special Halloween Snack

We made jello eyeballs for our special snack!  Ewwww...

Pumpkin games and activities

Time is flying and we have finished learning a our pumpkins.  We measured pumpkins, weighed them, opened them up and even made "fizzy" pumpkins. It was a busy week.

Ghost Poop!

Green Table Science today was all about ghost poop. Yes, you read that correctly!  We began by looking into our container and guessing what might be inside.  Most said that it was just water, but we had a few guesses of fish or sharks.  Then I asked kids if they had ever seen ghost poop (after we had a short discussion on how everyone poops).  I then put my hand in the water and told them it was ghost poop hiding in the water.  Most kiddos did not believe it, until they tried it themselves (oops - we did not get a no face pic of the kids feeling the poop).

The look on their faces was priceless when they put their hand in the water and felt "something" but could not see it!  After everyone had felt the "poop", we drained the container and "voila", a whole tub full of these clear, slippery, slimy, bumpy, wet, spheres (all their words, except sphere which was new to them today).  They were just water beads!  We poured some beads into giant tubs for the kids to play with for a while.  Sorry, another no pic.  It was just so exciting!  

Then we put the beads back in the original container and I told them that the ghost had left us a message.  When they could not find the message, I poured water into the container and magic happened!  The ghost appeared under the water beads with a message that said "BOO!"

Fall Fiesta

It was a magnificent day thanks to all of our wonderful parent volunteers!  Thank you for spending the day with us and helping to make our day special.  It has taken me several days to download all of the magnificent pictures you all helped take and weed through them. It was quite a challenge finding pictures without kids faces!  I am sure your kids had a great time showing off all of their projects from Fall Fiesta. Here is a sneak peek into our day. 

Seeds Of Fall

We have spent the past two weeks looking at and exploring items you would find outside that are homes for seeds.
Items we have explored so far are:

• apples
• prickly buckeye tree cases
• pinecones
• milkweed pods

If you find anything that houses seeds, please send them in for us to check out!

Apples, Apples Everywhere!

It was apple week in preschool. We learned about all the parts of an apple, found the star hiding inside the apple, and played lots of apple games and activities.

We made applesauce today!

The preschool was quite smelly today...  It smelled of apples!  We peeled, sliced, cored, cooked, smushed, and stirred tons of apples today to make applesauce. It was delicious and most of our little friends thought so too. Even the few hesitant ones all tried a taste.

We also did a taste test experiment.  We tried red, yellow, and green apples.  If we liked the taste of the apple color we tried, we would put a sticky on that part of the chart.  Then we counted up all the votes and made some conclusions about the results.  The PM class totals all came in at the same number! The AM was almost the same.

A Mrs. D Favorite Story

One of my all time favorite stories is "The Liitle Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything".  We read the story over and over again as kids took turns later in the week helping to place the pieces on the magnetic board.  The old lady takes a walk in the woods and bumps into various pieces of clothing along the way.  The most fun part of the story is how each piece of clothing has it's own movement and noise in attempts to scare the old woman.  In the end, the clothing forms into a scarecrow to scare the crows away.  We also made a scarecrow project that is hanging on our classroom walls. 

Fall Unit Weekly Actvities

By far the most popular activity this week was the lentil beans, pom poms, and scoopers!  The second most popular was the leaf sort into paper bags attached to the table. Fall is such an exciting time of year for the kids with all the colors and changes!

Animal Adventure Visits Preschool

We had a blast on Thursday with all of the animals that came to visit us from Animal Adventures!  We saw a chinchilla, box turtle, alligator, skunk, a rabbit, a bearded dragon lizard, hedgehog, a ball python and a giant python.  We got to hold the giant python, but it took lots of us preschoolers to hold on tight!  We got to touch and pet any animal we wanted to.  Some animals were so very soft, others were covered in scales or bumps, and others were a bit prickly!

Zoo Games and Activities -week 2

Fun games this week included matching spots on the creature from the book "Put Me in the Zoo", a wooden jungle puzzle, and giving the animals a bath with shaving cream.  We also played a game where we spun a spinner to hlep us follow a path of animals (similar to Candy Land).  The kids had a blast trying to feed the animals some brown pom-poms by dropping them into zoo animal bowls and lifting the elephants trunk to feed him paper peanuts.  The older students worked on identifying if the peanuts had a letter or number on them.  Another favorite this week were the lego animal puzzles.  On to our Fall and Appple Unit next week!

Pineapple Lion Snack

A yummy treat today!

More Table Games from Week 1

Here are some more activities we did last week for Zoo.  Zebra Stripe matching, Crocodile Dentist, Feed the Monekys, and a roll and cover game where we rolled a dice and fed the monkeys that many bananas until our card was full.

Zoo Unit Week 1 Table Games

Week one was filled with lots of fun activities such as hanging the Barrel Full of Monekys on a tree breanch, bulding homes for our animals by matching popsicle sticks and playdough, playing zoo animal lotto (and it is always nice to have an alligator puppet friend help out), matching animal pictures with their shadows, and sorting peacock feathers!

 

 

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