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.