For table time, we made alligators using pattern blocks and put together animal zoo puzzles. A favorite activity was pretending to be zookeepers and giving our animals a bath. We used shaving cream to wash them and then spray bottles filled with water to squirt them down. We practiced our pre-writing skills tracing animal pictures. AM kids matched characters from the Brown Bear story, while PM kids matched the animals to the color words. We made zoos with playdough, matching colored popsicle sticks for the cage, and then we put plastic animals inside. We used our pincer fingers to clip colored clothespins to match the Brown Bear animals too. AM kids fed the elephant peanuts, while PM kids practiced feed the elephant only letter or number peanuts. Graphing was our main math skill this week. Our younger kids rolled an animal dice, found the animal on their graph and added a paint dot. Our older students took it a step further, by rolling a number dice, finding the animal that corresponded to the number rolled, and then making a mark on their graph. With practice, kids are learning to figure out the "most, least, and the same" amounts by "reading" their graphs. Amazing huh? Other fun activities included matching animals, making zoo and jungle scenes with vinyl animal characters, and a super fun activity...the barrel full of monkeys to hang from the tree in our sand table!
More table activities included a feeding the monkey game to practice our counting and one-to-one correspondence skills (that each number has a corresponding item). We practiced making simple AB patterns by making zebra necklaces (black, white, black, white...). Stringing beads is also a great fine motor activity. We also helped our zebras find their stripes by matching their patterns. Our letters the past two weeks were K for Kangaroo and B for Bear. We continue learning about ways to say hello from around the world. Recently, we have found China and Korea on the globe! During circle time, we sang silly songs like "5 Elephants went out to play, out on a spider's web one day"! As we sang the song, kids put an elephant on our sticky spider web. They thought that was very funny. Our gorilla beanie baby (he got cut off in the photo) climbed the banana tree to catch a banana treat as we rolled a dice and moved him piece by piece up the tree. For the older students, we counted how many rolls it took to get the gorilla to the top!
