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.
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!
