Thanksgiving

Our unit on Families and Thanksgiving ended with our Thanksgiving Show and Family Get-Together.  The kids had a wonderful time making the fruit kabobs and muffins for you.  I wish I could post some of the very cute pictures of the kids during their performances, but that will have to wait until the end of the year movie!



In this unit, we talked learned about Families and who is in a family.  We made family graphs and made our house book.  The letter F for Family was our featured letter.  Feathers, Pilgrims, Native Americans and Turkeys also filled our couple of weeks.  We learned how to set a table and how to pass the food as we filled our plates with lots of yummy Thanksgiving foods (pom-poms).  Strong hands activities included tracing paths, using clips to give turkeys their feathers and to match colors, and poking pipe cleaners into a colander.

More turkeys!  We used beads and pattern blocks to make colorful turkeys and matched turkey tummy colors.  We played a cornucopia game where we rolled a colored dice to find foods to put in our cornucopia.  Corn kernals filled our sensory table.  It was a bit noisy, but it they loved them!  Sticky paper turkeys were fun to make.  We used a stuffed animal turkey as a fishing pole (string attached to his beak with a magnet on the end) to fish for magnetic letters to feed our turkey.  Plastic silverware helped us make patterns.  We continued to learn about Mat Man and how to make pictures of our bodies.

Turkey basters were used to have pom-pom races!  We matched shapes that were the turkey bodies and cut out lots of paper feathers.  Real cranberries filled our water table and the kids were amazed at how they float!  Pulling corn kernals from a real Indian corn cob with tweezers was a favorite activity.  After we pulled them out, we added the kernals to our corn table.  Do you like pie?  We do, as we matched pie colors (older kids used color names, younger kids matched pie to pie).  We used our math Unifix cubes to match colors to turkeys and built cube towers.  Rolling a color dice to fill up our turkeys was another favorite.  On the second day, we filled up our turkeys and rolled the dice to take away the colors.

Body Unit

Who knew that learning about our bodies could be so much fun.  We sang a lot of songs with movements and dancing around, such as "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, I Have Ten Little Fingers, Where is Thumbkin?, Johnny's Hammer, The Hokey Pokey" and many more!  We played games making bodies like Mrs. Potato Head, drawing faces galore, and making playdough fingers and mouths with bean teeth.  We worked on our small finger muscles by stringing yarn hair into tiny holes.  Do you like our "crime scene" bodies?  We didn't call them that with the kids, but they sure look like them!  We made these bodies by tracing around one of our friends with blocks!  They LOVED that activity!

A favorite circle time game was Body Twister.  Instead of the typical hand and feet body part pictures, Mrs. D changed the parts to such things as head, knees, elbows, noses, bottoms, thumbs, etc.  This game got everyone giggling and rolling in laughter!   We learned about Mat Man and how to draw bodies from the top down.  We even explored our fingerprints with ink and magnifying glasses to see the swirls and patterns.  We weighed ourselves and measured how tall we are!  We looked at our skin, hair, and eye colors to make self portraits.

Later on, we moved from body parts to the Five Senses.

Listening with our ears = Hearing environmental noises on the CD player and figuring out what they were.  Making beautiful music by following a letter strip for which keys to press.  Listening to funny noise buzzers as we played a senses game.  Smelling with our noses = We had smelly jars to figure out what the smell was.  Tasting with our tongues = We had sweet, salty, and sour taste tests.  Feeling with our hands = We used feeley jars and used our mystery box to touch things and try to figure out what was hiding inside.  Seeing with our eyes = We looked around for colors of things and played "I Spy with My Little Eye".  Mrs. Bailey played a fun senses game where we rolled a dice and got to have a question that used our eyes, ears, or hands.

GYM this week was just so much fun!  Each child got a strip of sticker dots.  They ran around chasing each other to put dots on our bodies!!  We learned about the letter X for Xray. 

A favorite story was the Napping House.  Mrs. Bailey played "Partner to Partner" where kids had to stick body parts together with their partner!  The vibrating squiggle pens were a hit as well.  We also played with body part rhymes to draw a person on our white board.  We also got to make lots of silly faces and play with emotions during our unit.  Below the kids are "fishing" for feelings and sorting them into trays.

Turkey Trot!

Last Thursday, we participated in our annual Preschool Turkey Trot.  Fun was had by all as the kids followed the trail of brightly colored feathers that led out of our classrooms, down the walkway, and into the Ripley Building.  As the kids frantically gathered all of those feathers, they met up with a giant turkey in the hallway.  It was Ms. Balmuth (our Occupational Therapist), wearing a feather cape and a fun mask!  We followed Ms. B around the Ripley offices greeting everyone with a "Gobble, gobble, gobble.  Turkey has a waddle!" and wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving.  After making our way around the offices, we completed our trot with a giant circle of preschool kids and teachers putting on the "Chicken Dance".  It was a fun day for all!

Halloween Fun!

Halloween is always such a fun and playful time of year.  We had a blast with all kinds of games and activities.  Spiders were on the loose in our web basket and sticky spider web with black pom-poms.  We played ghost bowling, found ghost eyeballs (craft google eyes) in flubber, and matched monster eye ball colors to the colored monsters (more google eyes).  We rolled a color dice to help the witch find her hats and worked together to put the tops back on the number candy corn.  The sensory table had Halloween creatures frozen in ice cubes and frozen hands floating in the water.  The hands were made by filling up rubber gloves with colored water and freezing them.  The kids were amazed at how the ice melted and changed the color of the water!  We made monster faces to go along with our story, Go Away Big Green Monster!.

The pumpkin gameboard was a hit with our PM kids.  They rolled an orange dice with pumpkins on it instead of black dots.  Gym was a laughing, giggly time using orange balloons.  The goal was to try and keep them in the air as much as you could.  We also used our parachute to bounce them up and down.  Some went flying, some stuck to the parachute with static electricity.  We acted out our BIG PUMPKIN story by wearing the creature hats.

One of Mrs. D's favorite days before Halloween is our bubbling and fizzing experiments.  There were two tables.  One table was our frothing pumpkin and balloon ghosts.  Inside the pumpkin, we put baking soda, green food coloring, and some dish soap.  Then we added vinegar, and "voila", bubbles flowed out of our pumpkin's mouth!  For the ghost, we put vinegar in the bottom of a 1 liter soda bottle.  Then we put some baking soda into a white balloon (with a ghost face drawn on it) using a funnel and attached it to the soda bottle.  When you lift the balloon up, the baking soda falls into the vinegar.  The reaction of the baking soda and vinegar make bubbles filled with gas.  The air has no where to go, so it fills up the balloon.  The best part...taking the balloon off the soda bottle and letting him fly!!!

At the Witch's Brew table, kids put spoonfuls of baking soda into their little cauldrons from the big cauldron and added a little bit of dish soap (to make it really frothy).  The kids then got to use eye droppers filled with green colored vinegar to their mixture.  You should have heard the squeals of excitement as their cauldron's bubbled over!

Our Halloween Party Day!

We played lots of games in Mrs. D & Ms. McGregor's classrooms.  We thank the families that helped us keep them busy!!  Then we went Trick-or-Treating over in the big Ripley building to get treats from the administrative staff!  Mrs. D was dressed as a Chicka Boom tree and Mrs. Hill was a clown.

Ghost Poop Mystery Revealed!

Here is the scoop on the "GHOST POOP"!

Today we explored ghost poop and had quite the giggly Halloween Fun joke.  At first we talk about how everyone poops, even ghosts.  I asked if anyone had ever seen, touched, or smelled ghost poop.  Of course that brings on the laughter and the "eeeewww" noises.

I then show them a big clear tub full of ghost poop.  They can't believe it when I put my hand right in it.  Then I ask them to give it a try and tell me what they are feeling.  Some of the replies today were, "I feel something, it is slippery, there are balls in there, it's cold (the water was chilly), it is wet".

Then we pull some "poop" out so they can see the clear spheres that we were feeling in the water.  They were amazed that the clear balls disappear when you put them back in the water.  We do this a few times and talk about how the balls are clear (not white), they are round spheres, they are small and slippery, etc.

Then I drain the water and they are amazed at how many little spheres there are.  We get to play with them for a little while without the water.  Then I tell them that the ghost who gave us the poop wants to give us a secret message.  To do this, I place a paper underneath the tub with the spheres.  Since there are so many of these little balls, you cannot see the message underneath the tub.  As I begin to pour water back into the tub, the message becomes clearer.  You can now see though the clear water, clear beads, and the clear tub!  Underneath, the message shows a little ghost and the word, "boo!"  We will get to play with the poop tomorrow in big tubs.

The clear spheres are actually water beads.  They start out as hard, tiny, round beads.  When you place them in a tub of water overnight, they absorb the water and grow exponentially in size.  They are meant to put in flower vases to help with the watering or to help hold the stems upright.  You can find packages of them in the flower section at craft stores like Michael's.

Now you know the whole story!!  Happy Halloween!

Big Pumpkin story

Here are two links to Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman.  One is the the story being read by someone where you can see the pages of the book as he reads it.  The second is the story sung just like the CD we used, but no story book pages.  Enjoy!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHkuZKAW7bs  (story CD)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZSfUlKx98  (picture book being read)

Pumpkins Are Everywhere!

We are gearing up for the Halloween preschool frenzy as we start to wind down our Fall Unit.  Pumpkins invaded our preschool classroom!  The kids loved the pumpkin play clay that was made out of a can of pumpkin puree, cornstarch and pumpkin spice.  The room smelled delicious as the kids made pumpkin creations using google eyes, sticks, black beans, green pipe cleaners and curling ribbon, colored plastic straws and yellow beads.  We also used that same clay to practice rolling balls to fill up a pumpkin playdough mat.  We played a pumpkin dice game with the numbers 1, 2, & 3.  During circle time we pulled a magnetic letter out of a pumpkin bucket and then found the same letter on the ActivBoard.  When they located the letter, the made an orange dot (pumpkin) to cover the letter.  We used our pincer fingers to pick up and fill pumpkin ice cube trays and our strong hands to pound golf tees into a pumpkin with a hammer.  We matched pumpkin faces, built pumpkin floor puzzles, and created pumpkin potato head people with real small pumpkins!  We had a giant pumpkin game board we rolled a dice and moved our pieces to the end and a pumpkin number line vine (boy that was a mouthful!).  We also let loose all of the wonderful milk weed seeds you sent in.  The kids had a blast letting them fly!  We filled up the playground with all the white fluff!

Apples continued for a bit more this week now that we found our missing plastic balls!  We pretended that the red, yellow and green balls were apples.  The blue balls were rotten apples and the orange were pumpkins.  Mrs. D and Mrs. Hill spilled all of the apples and the kids ran around chasing the apples and sorting them into the correct colored bins.  We took turns using snowball scoops to pick up the balls.  They had a blast and we repeated the activity several times!  Below you can see how we matched pumpkin patterns and pumpkin face letters.  We used our strong fingers to put ribbons into a soda jar, pick up small pumpkin and halloween things with tweezers, lace up pumpkin shapes (not pictured), and put pumpkins onto a curvy straw.  We played pumpkin shape lotto, put together popsicle stick pumpkin puzzles, and played in a pumpkin sensory bin. 

During circle time, we learned the Five Little Pumpkins fingerplay, where the lights go out!  It was actually Mrs. Hill being sneaky, but it took the kids several times before they figured out the magic of the lights going out during our song!  We went pumpkin picking in a pretend pumpkin patch and had to follow the movement directions written on the pumpkins (such as touch your head and then turn around).  We sang a fun song about turning a pumpkin into a jack'o lantern and some others too.  We had fun with a book on CD, Big Pumpkin, one of Mrs. D's favorites!  The AM kids got to act out the story wearing witch, ghost, vampire, mummy, and bat hats!  The PM kids will get to do that next week.  I will be trying to include a link on our blog of the story.  Check it out!

Fall Fiesta

Our Annual Fall Fiesta is a special event in preschool.  We had so much fun with all kinds of fall activities.  Thanks to all of the parent help, our day was super successful!  We scooped our pumpkins to see and feel all of the pumpkin pulp.  We talked about the inside and outside of a pumpkin, how slippery everything felt, and so on.  After the gooey part, the kids got to vote which Jack 'o Lantern face they liked the best (happy, sad, scary).  We made fall hats that will come home this week as we did not get time to measure all of their little heads!  We stamped out trees, leaves, and apples and did leaf rubbings with a crayon.  Our "drip, drop leaves" are so beautiful!  We use special diffuser paper that the kids color with watercolor markers and then spray with water.  The colors all blend and mix with the water.  We also make apple cereal necklaces that were so tempting to eat at school!  Of course the favorite activity is always the pumpkin bowling.  We use small round pumpkins instead of bowling balls to knock down the pins!

One of Mrs. D's favorite stories is "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything".  Below is a link to the story read aloud.  It is not as exciting as our version, as Mrs. D adds the motions to each of the clothing parts and uses a little old lady voice to jazz it up a bit and to make the story more interactive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvUFo-Y0ZM

Apples and Fall Unit

Thank you all for being so understanding and sending well wishes my way during my absence.  Unfortunately, I only have one week of photos for you.

Fall is such a busy unit as it can go on and on in so many directions!  For the first two weeks, our focus is on what "Fall" is as a season and what changes are taking place.  THANK YOU for all of the wonderful fall goodies!  We have our whole science exploration area filled with milkweeds, pinecones, acorns, leaves, flowers, cattails, pumpkins, gourds, sunflowers, apples, etc.  You all did a great job!  Magnifying glasses are spread throughout and the kids are starting to learn how to use them!  Take a look at our picture below.

We played an apple tree game with a 1, 2 dice.  We rolled the dice and filled up our apple trees.  The second day, our older students rolled a second dice with the words, "add" and "take away", on it.  Once they realized that "take away" was not a bad thing, there were lots of giggles and apples came and went.  We had several scarecrow puzzles, matching games, and pattern blocks (not pictured).  Craft foam apples floating in the water table was a huge success.  Our apple poster was all about using our visual discrimination skills to match leaves to the correct apple.  Felt trees and acrylic leaves and apples were added using number cards.  We used strong hands to roll colored playdough to fill up the colored leaf cards, used our little pincer fingers to pick up beads and match them to the colored apples, and using tweezers and small scoops to pick up apple colored pom poms.  One favorite activity was creating a tree on sticky paper using tree parts (trunk, branches, foam leaves).  It is always fun watching how each child creates something different with all of the parts.  Each one unique, just like all of us!

Circle time focused on BIG and little.  We sorted big and little apples using their attributes ("It is a BIG, green, apple" or "It is a little, red apple").  We weighed small pumpkins and decorative gourds.  We made a prediction on which item would be heavier and then we tested it using our balance scale.  We explored sunflowers and talked about the seeds in apples.  Did you know there was a star inside an apple?  If you cut the apple side to side (not stem to bottom), the seed core makes a star shape.  To find the star inside, Mrs. D told a story (no picture book, just a verbal story) about a "Little Red House with No Windows, No Doors, and a Star Inside).  Our discussions continued on how "things" are houses for seeds, an apple is a house for a seed, a sunflower is a house for a seed, milkweed pods, pumpkins, etc.

We tasted the three colors of apples to see which one(s) we liked best.  In gym, we became leaves floating in the breeze with our scarves and bounced leaves on our parachute.

APPLESAUCE!  This is such a fun cooking project as the kids get to be so involved from start to finish.  We used a special apple peeler, corer, slicer machine to cut and peel our apples.  Everyone loves turning the handle and watching the "apple spaghetti" (skin), roll off the apple.  Even though we did all that work, we add the peels to the cut apples to give the applesauce a nice pink color and to keep all those great nutrients!  After we cooked the apples down, the kids are amazed to see how the apples changed and were so mushy.  We used a food mill to squish the apples and to take out all the peels and any seeds that snuck in.  Afterwards, we added some cinnamon and ate our yummy applesauce.  Most kids came back for seconds and would have eaten even more if we let them!

Pineapple Lions Cooking Project

We made delicious pineapple lions to complete our zoo unit.  Amazingly, most everyone ate the whole thing!  Most children loved eating his nose first and there were many giggles about eating the lions face.

Finishing Up Zoo Unit

We completed our Zoo Unit with continued exploration and games to go along with learning about animals you might find at a zoo.

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!

Animal Adventures!

Animal Adventures visited preschool last Tuesday!  Both classes had a wonderful time with Zoo Keeper Emily.  She showed us many animals that had fur and scales.  We got to learn about them, see them up close, and even touch any animal we wanted to.  Below are photos of the animals.  I was able to find a few pics without faces of the kids touching the animals.  You'll have to wait for the end of the year preschool movie for some special ooh and ahh faces!

The baby rabbit named "Nugget" was only 5 weeks old and it was her first trip away from mommy.  She brought along her sibling "Chicken" to keep her company on the journey.  She was one of the kids' favorites.  The skink gets its' name from their blue tongue.  Mrs. Hill and I tried to get a pic of the tongue, but he was too fast for us!  The lizard was surprisingly soft to touch and the spines were not sharp at all!

The ferret was a bit smelly.  Kind of like a wet dog!  The kids were in complete giggles watching him do the hula dance and get folded in half, backwards!  Who could not love that little face?  The skunk was HUGE!!  It was getting ready to hibernate for the winter.  This skunk was very special because of it's unusual coloring.  The stink of the skunk was taken out, so no smelly skunk!  The kids were quite impressed with the baby alligator.  At their zoo, they have an 8 foot long alligator!  The alligator's mouth was taped closed so he would not take a nibble of someone's finger.  The kids were very happy to hear that the tape does not hurt him.

Another favorite animal was the chinchilla.  If you have never pet a chinchilla, you will never believe how soft they are!  Chinchillas are great climbers and hide from their prey in very tiny spaces.  The PM kids got to have a chinchilla sit on their head!  We also got to see the chinchilla get "squished" into a taco and a burrito.  This showed us how they squeeze into those small spaces!  Can you believe that we have corn snakes here in Massachusetts?  They are very afraid of vibration, so they often slither away quickly and hide from us.  They are harmless and the kids were amazed at how smooth the snake was.

Agh!  The boa is by far Mrs. D's least favorite creature friend!  The kids were oh, so brave to hold the boa in their laps!

Zoo Unit - Week 1

We are finally in the swing of things and have begun our first "real" unit of the school year.  We dove right into the Zoo Unit with all kinds of zoo activities, songs and games.  We are learning animal names, where they like to live and play, and about their characteristics (colors and skin patterns, how many legs, how they like to move, and other body features such as teeth, tails and so forth).

This week for table time, we sorted peacock feathers by their colors and used our little pincer fingers to push and pull putty apart to find zoo animal erasers hidden inside.  Other fine motor activities to get strong hands included feeding Mr. Monkey plastic bananas with tweezers, following paths to match animals, and putting together Duplo blocks to make animal pictures.  We also fed monkeys on long stick grabbers that you had to use pull triggers on the end to make the mouths open and close to catch the pom-pom "food".  A favorite activity was the Elefun game.  There are small fabric butterflies that fly up the elephant's trunk with a fan inside the elephant.  You have to catch the flying butterflies with nets.  Most of the time, the butterflies fell to the floor and placed into the nets by little fingers!  We counted bananas to string onto monkey cards and matched animal pictures to their shadows.

Two teacher table games included "Please Do Feed the Animals" where they got to put a gem onto the animal picture if they had that animal on their game card.  The other game was called, "Going to the Zoo!"  This is played like Candy Land.  You spin the spinner to find out what animal you will travel along the path to visit.

More table activities included zoo animal rubber stamps, playdough with animal stampers, a zoo floor puzzle, and Crocodile Dentist (a game where you push the croc's teeth one at a time, and eventually one of the teeth causes his mouth to "chomp").  We matched the spots on the creature from the Put Me in the Zoo book with magnetic pom-poms .  We also drew on spots on our giraffes to match the number on the card.

During Circle Time, we learned the song, "Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" and acted it out.  We sang, "Monkeys Teasing Mr. Alligator" and Mrs. D used her monkey pom-pom puppets and a green sock for the alligator.  We danced around to an animal moves song!  Another game we played was "Land, Sea, and Air".  Mrs. D had lots of animal photos to name and then decide where they liked to live.  We found that some animals like to be in two or more places.  There were some really goofy and silly looking creatures in her envelope!

The AM kids got to pick their pumpkin from the pumpkin patch!  Now we have two pumpkins waiting for our Pumpkin Fun week and Fall Fiesta.

FIRE DRILL!!
We even had a fire drill one morning!  Here we are going out the playground gate to practice getting out of the school quickly and safely!  Mrs. Sumner was one of the adults who helped hold our hands.  Once we got to the soccer fields, we sang a few songs to pass the time.

All in all, it was a short, but fun and busy week!

Our First Few Days of School

The We have had a great first few days getting to know the rules and routines, learning one another's names, and just having fun!

During Table Time, we caught rolling marbles (an excellent eye-hand coordination and visual tracking activity), used our pincher fingers to pick up pom poms, place straws in small holes in a cheese container, drop pennies in the slot of a squeeze jelly jar, and fill up test tubes with water using a large eye dropper.  We also strung letter beads on Mrs. D's Chicka Boom tree.  We played a lot of cookie games with matching cookies, counting chocolate chips (pom-pom's) onto a cookie (shown in next collage) and filling up cookie jars with magnetic cookies.  We also played a cookie game where we followed a cookie "recipe".  There were cookie cards with ingredients on the back.  We picked up the cookies to find our ingredients with a suction cup spoon.  We had to watch out for the "rotten egg" cards.

Our letter this week was H, so there were several ways to explore making an H with Duplos, pattern blocks, and stamping (not pictured).  We also found magnetic letters in a tub filled with packing peanuts.  After catching the letters with a magnetic wand, the kids would match the letter onto a letter mat.

Two of our most favorite activities were in the sensory table.  Colored water beads wiggled and jiggled as we scooped them up.  They were very slippery and bouncy too!  We made lots of colored foam in the water table.  We re-used hand soap containers filled with water and about 1 tsp. of clear dish soap.  Of course we added food coloring to our mixtures.  Voila!  Many hours of foam fun!

We also played a Preschool Friend Lotto Game where we found the pictures of all our new friends and teachers.  This game will be coming home to play with your family in the upcoming weeks.

After reading, the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story, for project/craft time, we made Chicka trees with our handprints and letters in our name as well as a Chicka snack with pretzle rods, green apple slices, and a black grape "coconut".  Most of the kids gobbled up their trees with gusto!  We made sculptures with foam blocks, pipe cleaners and beads.

During circle time we learned quite a few new songs.  Some songs were just for fun and to help everyone feel more comfortable, and others helped us learn each other's names.  The hits were Sticky Bubble Gum, Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie Jar, and Stand Up.  One game they enjoyed was the Backpack song/game.  Each kiddo got a turn to wear the special backpack while we all sang a song.  At the end of the song, that child got to pick a card out of the backpack.  The card told us silly things to do, such as jump up and down, clap our hands, count to 10, etc.  We also played a find and seek game with our shoes!  Each child and teacher took off one of their shoes and we placed them in the middle of our circle time area.  One at a time, each child picked up a shoe and then located it's owner.  This was another game to help us learn each other's names.  Our kick a ball game started off great as we passed the ball to one another by calling out their names.  However, it quickly blew up into a full fledged kick the ball around game (as I knew it would) that brought on LOTS of GIGGLES and LAUGHTER!

Our preschool garden is in full bloom!  The PM kids got to visit the garden and helped our class choose one of the pumpkins.  We cut it off the vine and will use it during our pumpkin explorations and our Fall Fiesta coming up in a few weeks!  The AM class will pick their pumpkin this coming week.

Welcome to Preschool 2015-2016!

Welcome to Mrs. D's preschool blog!  It is my hope that this blog will give you a glimpse into your child's school day and that you can feel a part of our experiences.  I welcome your comments on what you like or any suggestions for improvement.  I want this to be a valuable use of all of our time!

Now onto our first day....
Hopefully, you all saw the small green ball of green playdough that came home and read the note about our Magic Playdough.  The kids were really excited to see the dough change colors.  It is going to be a good year!

Bugs, Bugs & More Bugs!

This unit lends itself to many, many strong hands activities where we get to use our little fingers.  Using strawberry hullers, we placed teeny tiny little plastic ants into small ice cub trays.  The sand table was filled with all kinds of plastic bugs that we scooped, crawled and helped dig tunnels for.  Rubber stamps were flying as kids created beautiful bug scenes or just went crazy stamping bugs.  We had pattern block butterflies to make, rubber caterpillars to pick up with butterfly hair clips, and Cootie Bugs to make.  Bug Easter eggs were fun to match and put together and we had a blast with the wind up bug toys to make them move, wiggle, hop, or jump.  Magnetic puzzle pieces were tricky to take out and put in with a magnet attached to a string.  We fed our hungry caterpillars and played BUG SWAT where you have to use a small fly swatter to point to a bug picture.  We work on "symmetry" during our bug unit, as butterflies and bugs are nature's perfect demonstrator of natural symmetry.

The bees were buzzing to their hive with a letter beehive lotto game.  Our ladybugs needed some spots, so the younger kids rolled a color dice to determine what color spots our ladybugs needed, and the older kids used a dice and the "key" to find their colors.  Ladybug squeezers helped to save the leaves from pom pom aphids.  Ants in the Pants creates lots of giggles and laughter seeing those colored ants fly around!  More symmetry is explored with butterfly games, coloring, and "design your own" butterflies using felt pieces.  We searched for small bee erasers in a tub filled with Honeycomb cereal.  A different tub of bug parts helped us create even more bug creatures!  A magical activity was the spider web rubbing.  The kids were amazed by the "hidden" spider webs on our table (glue that had dried that I made in the shape of a spider web).  With a piece of paper and the side of a crayon, VOILA! a spider web is created!  They then made fingerprint spiders on their webs to add to the effect.  Scoop a Bug is fun as you have to use scooper tongs to pick up the bugs and sort them where they belong.  I also had a smaller Eric Carle, Very Hungry Caterpillar puzzle they enjoyed.

The kids had a blast being bakers while decorating their own cupcakes with pastry bags filled with icing.  We then put all of their wonderful creations together to form a long cupcake caterpillar.  Of course the best part, eating the caterpillars!  Kids got to experience the world of a bug by putting on a bug headband, complete with antennae, and then crawling around under our grassy table.  The timer was busy buzzing away as everyone wanted some turns!  More symmetry with butterfly alphabet matching, creating bugs with the Rainbow Blocks and our magnificent butterfly paintings!  Stringing spiders on their webs was great counting practice.  Playdough and diffuser paper made some wonderful bug creations as well.  We pretended to be bees gathering pollen and placing it in the honeycombs with little yellow beads and tweezers.  There is that static electricity again!  This time we made butterflies fly!

The Bug Unit lends itself to an author study on Eric Carle.  He is one of my favorite authors and his books always have a special surprise.  We read the Very Hungry Caterpillar and the next day we fed a tin can caterpillar his food the next day as we worked on story sequencing and the life cycle of a butterfly.  The Very Busy Spider lent itself to our glue spider webs on the table and making a hula hoop weaving web.  The Very Quiet Cricket with it's magical chirping at the end, The Very Lonely Firefly with the blinking fireflies at the end, and The Very Clumsy Click Beetle with his clicking at the end, are the top kid favorites.  The Grouchy Ladybug works on size concepts and a discussion on feelings, as well as that is how they learned about the bad aphids eating the leaves.  Mrs. D transformed herself into a bug with special goggles.  We played "Bug in the Rug" with the parachute.  This is a detective game where one student (the bug detector) looks around the circle to see who is missing (the bug) and hiding under the rug (parachute).  We played this game over and over!  The older kids just love the beehive game where we try to figure out how many bees are hiding by process of elimination with the numerals.  If there are 3 bees hiding and someone guesses 7, we can erase the 7 and then all of the numbers above 7 (8, 9, 10).  If they guess 2, we can erase 2 and also 1.  Eventually the kids narrow the numbers down so they can guess the correct number of bees hiding.

Bug Lady Visit!

Miss Maire Anne (also known as the "bug lady" by the kids) from BugWorks out of Sudbury, came to visit us last week.  She brought with her many different creatures for us to look at, touch and explore.  She talked about their sizes, shapes, how they protect themselves, what they eat, and how they grow.  She also talked about where some of them came from.  WE LOVE THE BUG LADY!!

Below we had large meal worms that turn into beetles as they mature.  She even showed us a beetle that pretends it is dead to protect itself from predators.  One of the meal worms shed it's skin during the presentations that day (second plate picture with one meal worm and skin).

Here is a giant grasshopper.  He does not fly, his wings are too small, but he does have red under his wings that he can show to say "don't eat me, I taste bad"if something tries to eat him.  The plate with the "second" smaller grasshopper is actually another skin that was shed by the grasshopper that she brought to show us.  She brought a praying mantis baby and a mother one for us to look at and a walking stick.

Below is a hissing cockroach and two kinds of millipedes.  See the cute baby millipede below?

Frog, Lizards, Snakes and Turtles - oh my!

What a lot of creature learning we have going on.  It never ceases to amaze me how much knowledge kids have about the world around them and how curious they are to learn more!

Activities this unit included placing and balancing frogs on a log/wooden block (to go with our song, "Five Green and Speckled Frogs".  For math activities, we added numeral cards to a frog counting book, made frog number lines, created snake patterns, helped frogs eat the correct number of flies, and holding our own creature races by rolling a color and a number dice while making predictions on which creature will win first and who will come in last.  Our strong hands fed flies to a frog with tweezers, traced curvy frog tongue paths, squeezing rubber frogs to open their mouths to feed them foam flies, and coloring lizards amazing colors!  We also had a ton of plastic frogs and craft foam lily pads in the water table and a giant frog puzzle to put together.

How do lizards eat?  With long sticky tongues!  Our lizards ate with magnetic flies.  Matching snakes and frog pictures and frog colors were favorite activities for the AM class.  Sorting and grouping rubber snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs into a sorting tray was a favorite of the PM class.  There were no rules and no clues on how to sort the creatures.  The kids thought of great sorting categories all on their own (by color, by creature, by creature and color, ones that had legs and no legs, animals that are on the ground and ones that can go in the water, etc.).  We also enjoyed alphabet lily pad lotto, sorting turtles by size, and having fun with turtle bean bags and lily pads.  Mrs. D made pipe cleaner snakes so we could fill up colander holes and string cheerios on them.

Can you put the animals where they belong?  With a little clue card, the kids matched the plastic creature with it's initial sound (frogs went on the letter F's, snakes went on the letter S, etc.).  We worked on strong hands by tracing frog paths, using pool noodle pieces to string long snakes on clothesline rope, lacing up turtle cards, and tracing, then cutting straight lines.  AM kids fingerpainted chameleons beautiful and bright colors.  PM kids made a snake numberline that went 1-30.  They really had to work together to complete this long snake!  Cinnamon sugar snakes were a hit for our cooking project.  Our science experiment this unit was to learn about static electricity to make our frogs jump to the balloon.  We first rubbed a filled balloon on our hair to create all of those negative charged electrons.  Then we held the balloon above frog tissue paper cut outs, and VOILA! the positively charged tissue frogs magically jumped to the balloon.  Of course this activity was done over and over again.  They also had a great time seeing their hair stand up tall!

See our tadpoles?  They are growing so fast!  We are on the look out for hind legs.  The PM kids painted snake pictures at the easel.  There were a lot of colorful designs and creations.  S is for Snake with our snake paper chain craft the PM kids did.  Our frog below and his long tongue was a greater than, less than activity where we moved the frogs tongue to the "most" bugs because he was so hungry.  Rattlesnake patterns were a hit.  Each kiddo got a rattlesnake to hold (a plastic mini m&m container with some corn kernals inside and googly eyes and a tongue on the top.  Mrs. D made a pattern on the giant black snake with pattern blocks.  The kids were on the lookout to see if Mrs. D made a mistake.  If she did, they shook their rattlesnakes.  Then we fixed the pattern and continued on.  There was lots of measuring going on.  The AM kids measured how far a frog jumped with foot cards and the PM kids measured classroom items with frog feet rulers.  Mrs. Bailey had fun with the kids during her language groups.