Space Unit

This was a fast unit with our snow day and special robot presentation.  I don't feel like I got to ll of our fun activities, but we enjoyed anyhow! Space is always an "ADVENTURE"!

We built rocket ships by rolling a dice and finding the pieces we needed.  Another rocket game used small blocks, unifix cubes, or caps to make a rocket ship a certain number high.  We had space books to manipulate and felt pieces to create with.  We used our handwriting skills to trace stars and to use tweeers to pick out craft foam stars in black beans.  There were "moon rocks and spaceships" (tin foil balls and plastic grape tomato containers) with tongs and small astronaut puppets.  We had green moon sand also with marbles, more tomato containers and astronaut, rocket ship, and moon buggy plastic figurines.  We used large parquetry blocks to build some rocket ships and colored space ship pictures.  Kids used small finger rockets to shoot the moon.  We used large rockets later in the week (no picutre).

We learned about the solar system and planets.  We played with alien and robot wind up toys.  We used rocket cards to play a color "go fish" type game.  We learned about shadows because it was Groundhog Day and because of the Earth's shadows to get the different phases of the moon.  We used small googly eyes to give the alien cards their eyes.  In shredded paper, we found small plastic planets and made constellations with star erasers and popsicle sticks.  Our turntable made great solar systems with markers and we added sticker planets, stars and astronauts.  Some kids loved making star bead necklaces or use celestial rubber stamps.  We played a space lotto game that had all kinds of space words and concepts on it.

We blasted through space using our gameboard as we moved around the planets.  We used space tinker toys to build all kinds of structures.  We also matched the phases of the moon with cards.  In circle time, we had a great time making craters in the moon with a tub of flour and small wooden balls.  The "poof" of the flour all over our rug was a hit!  We sang "oodles" of blast off songs, astronauts visiting things in space, and of planet songs.  We had star fingerplays and lots of other rhymes.  We played alien tic-tac-toe with alien and spacemen pieces.  We learned about things that give us light and how the earth spins and moves to make summer and winter, day and night and the hit of Mrs. Bailey's group was playing a rocket ship alien hide and seek game.  At least once a day, we danced and moved to Laurie Berkner's Rocket Ship Run and the Wiggles Walking on the Moon.  I believe those will be the most memorable songs of the unit!

Winter Unit

Winter is such a HUGE unit!  We learn about the season of winter in general - how it feels and what it looks like.  We also talk about all of the things you can do in winter and what clothing you need to wear.  Then you get into winter animals, footprints, and animals that hibernate or migrate!

Roll and count snowmen, counting snowflakes on mittens and matching them with the numbers, and making snowballs with white playdough to make 10, and building snowmen with number strips.  We matched colored buttons to snowmen, used a special snowflake hole punch, made snowmen shape patterns, and cut out lots of snowballs!  We put together a mitten puzzle, used a salt tray to practice our "handwriting", used tweezers to sort small winter erasers, and played in the rice table filled with snowflakes and lima bean penguins.

We sorted little mittens into "left and right" by matching the thumb to the big mitten shape, practiced more handwriting sheets, and went ice fishing to catch colored paper fish.  We played a penguin and colored egg memory game, matched chilly letters, and counted lots of buttons to give to our snowmen.  Mrs. Bailey read Froggy Gets Dressed, and we helped our paper Froggy get dressed to play in the snow.  We used q-tips to make snowy shapes and used pattern blocks to make snowmen.  Oh what fun the kids had making snowman cup towers!  We used cotton balls for snowballs and played a number game.  We also played a roll a snowman game where you roll the dice and see what body part you need to add to your snowman drawing.

Do you want to build a snowman?  We did on the big rug.  We finally had some nice white fluffy stuff fall from the sky so we could use colored water to make snow designs and put colored ice cubes in.  We traced the snowflake paths from top to bottom and cut from bottom to top!  Another hit was building marshmallow structures!  We made scarf patterns with colored popsicle sticks and played a letter game with mini marshmallows.  There were a few color matching games, sparkly winter slime, and the traditional game of "Don't Break the Ice".

Our penguins came in many shapes that we matched and we fed our penguin some fishy crackers.  A big hit of the week was our snow sticky wall.  We used qtips, cotton balls, white tissue paper, and tiny styrofoam balls.  We tried a science experiment with ice cubes, ice and string.  The challenge was to see if you could lift the ice cube with the string.  We could not get it to work very well this year, but you are supposed to sprinkle some salt on the ice, let it melt for a minute and then place the string on the melting part.  After a couple of minutes, the string has re-frozen onto the ice cube and you can lift it up.  Well, ours did not work this year, but we had fun trying!  Styrofoam balls made great potato heads and we made silly snowmen puzzles.  Our penguins got some colored goldfish during our count and sort game.  We build winter animal words and matched bear paws with different textured materials.  More matching penguin games and counting cotton ball snowflakes for our snowmen.  We made a most GIANT disaster with our shoveling activity!  Mrs. D used cotton batting as "snow" and the kids used kid-sized shovels to shovel up the "snow".  Well it worked wonderfully, but afterwards, the rug looked like a blizzard!  The vacuum cleaner took care of that mess!

Gym was a blast these couple of weeks.  We used our platform catapults to launch sock snowballs into the air.  I bet you can see what fun we had with that one!  I could not find a photo with no kid faces in it, but we had giant snowball fights with the sock snowballs.  At one point, they all ganged up on Mrs. D and pelted her with the snowballs and then the PM class had Mrs. Hill on the floor getting her!  White balloons were a hit, but the gym was super dry and we had more balloons pop then fly.  We also went ice skating wearing our paper plate skates.  There is also a fun song called "Listen and Move" that you "listen" to the rhythm to determine what movement you will do, such as hopping was a boinging rhythm, galloping sounded like horse trotting, etc.  There was skating, running, and walking too.

During Language Group, Mrs. Bailey played a syllable game to help get the kids up and down the sledding mountain, pulled out all kinds of winter clothing from her special bag, and read us "Froggy Gets Dressed".  With Mrs. D, a few things we did was act like walrus with "sock" flippers as we tried to catch some fish, played Bear In the Chair (similar to musical chairs), and sang lots of snow and snowmen songs.  We loved playing Freeze to a song that when the music stops, you FREEZE!  I forgot to add pictures, but we had a great time learning how to walk like penguins with a soft squishy ball between our legs (that caused a lot of laughter) and using the same soft ball to play "kick the snowball" around the circle area.  The object was not to let the snowball out of our circle!  With the cold and snowy weather, we also did some Cosmic Kids yoga stories of Pedro the Penguin and Joybob the Polar Bear.  The kids love watching and moving with Jamie for our BrainPop time of the day when we can't get outdoors.

Another favorite activity was our "pretend snow".  It is called InstaSnow and it is a similar polymer that is inside a baby diaper.  When you add water to the tiny flakes of powder, a snowstorm explodes up and out of the cup.  The kids are always amazed and we do this over and over and over again.  Afterwards, we add play toys and away they go with lots of filling, dumping, measuring, and just having a ball.