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.

Bubble Program!

BUBBLES!  BUBBLES!  BUBBLES!

Miss Barbara Stella from the Acton Discovery Museum's Traveling Science outreach program came to visit us yesterday.  She brought us bubbles galore and we had a wonderful time being bubble scientists as we watched bubbles, played in bubble solution, blew bubbles, and explored bubbles.

Miss Stella first talked about the shape of bubbles, "spheres".  No matter what shaped bubble wand she used, all bubbles turn into spheres!  We learned that bubbles do best when it is moist, so she sprayed her spray bottle here and there to "wet" the air, so we could get the biggest and best bubbles.
She poked bubbles with a dry stick and it popped.  When she wet the stick, the bubble would not pop.

We also saw trampoline bubbles bounce up and down, that were made with a large home-made foam tube bubble wand.  After Miss Stella showed us bubbles galore, we got to play!  We had dishes (yes, you are seeing correctly - dog dishes) with oodles of wands and cookie cutters to make bubbles.  There was also a bubble window where a teacher got to pull up a plastic pipe with wire on the sides to make a bubble wall/window.  With dry hands or fingers, the bubble window popped.  With wet hands, we could put our hands in and out of the window.  VERY COOL!  We also blew into the bubble window to make LONG bubbles.  So much fun!  We did not get any "no kid faces photos" of the kids using their "air" to keep the bubbles up in the air.  They used their own mouths to blow, giant straws, and paper funnels.

Even Mrs. Hill and Mrs. D got into the fun too!  Mrs. D showed off how she uses her hands only to blow bubbles.  Some kids got the hang of the no wand method too!  We also blew up a bubble in a jar and put the top on it to keep the air out.  The bubble lasted many minutes without popping.  As soon as we opened the lid, the bubble popped!

A fun day had by all!

Germs & Washing Hands

Have you ever sung Happy Birthday to germs?  We did!  Mrs. King, our school nurse, came into both AM & PM classes (on different days), to do a hand washing lesson.  First Mrs. King showed us a germy hand picture and we talked about what germs are and how they can make you sick.  Then we figured out ways to get rid of those icky germs...by washing our hands!!  We played a little game where the different steps of washing our hands gets rid of more and more germs, until our hands are clean!  We then got to use "pretend germ" lotion to practice washing our hands.  Since we can't see the germs, Mrs. King used a special black light to show us how dirty our hands can get (the lotion).  See all the white stuff on our hands?? YUCK!!  We then practiced washing our hands.  You need water, soap, scrubbing, rinsing and drying to get rid of those pesky things!  While we scrubbed our hands, we sang Happy Birthday to the Germs two times to make sure we did it long enough.  Then we checked out our hands again and VOILA! most of our germs were washed away!  No more white spots on our hands.

Each child got a hand washing sticker, a certificate for doing a great job, and the hand washing card to bring home.  We hope you put the card in your bathroom to help children learn how to wash their hands better and hopefully stay healthier!

Thank you Mrs. King!

Colors & Shapes Unit

This unit is crazy busy!  There are just so many ways to play with colors and shapes!  We had a blast!

There are also tons of fun books to read too such as, Press Here, Little Blue and Little Yellow, Mouse Paint, White Rabbit's Color Book, The Crayon Box that Talked, Bear in the Square, Perfect Square, etc.  We never got to one of my favorites, Harold and the Purple Crayon.  Check it out in the library sometime and draw purple pictures!  The Ten Black Dots book that we made as a class book should be making it's way around to all of you soon.

Kids got to use lots of colored dot stickers to cover up numbers.  Each number had a certain color to use.  We stacked circle blocks, used shape stampers, hooked together shape dominoes, and used shape blocks in colored rice.  We played color drop with pom poms.  You sorted the pom poms into their colored tube and they fell right back into the bucket to be sorted all over again.  Some kids were very intrigued by how they came out the bottom of the tube!  We had red water beads to play in - always a hit!  Small plastic caps filled up our numbered gumball machines and we played a roll the dice gumball game.  The younger kids used only the colored dice to find out what color paint dot to use to make a "gumball" in their machine.  The older kids rolled two dice, a colored dice and a numbered dice.  They had to add the correct number of a given colored gumball to their machines.  The sorting tray was a hit with some kids, others preferred making crayon puzzles or creating "things" with colored shaped blocks.

Our smiling shapes just begged to be clipped with clothespins.  There were tons of shapes of all sizes and colors to put in their right places.  We played sorting games with shapes onto magnetic trays.  Kids sorted popsicle sticks by color and some even matched the letters to spell the color names.  Big shapes were taped to our table and we used different blocks and manipulatives to make the shapes.  We played color and shape Bingo with Miss Smokler.  Light Brite (the one pictured is ancient and was mine as a child) is always so magical to kids when they see the colored pegs light up after they push them into the black paper.  Shapes galore to sort and trace!  Colored moon sand and pom pom cupcake trays!

Color monsters love to munch their favorite colored items.  Mrs. D added google eyes and a pom pom nose to colored chip clips to make the monsters!  We used wikki stix (wax coated string that is very flexible) to follow shape outlines.  Our crayon boxes were drying to be filled and kids laced up shape items.  We used shape puzzles, sorting paint popsicle sticks, and matching color blocks.  Rainbows have all the colors, except ours, which was missing purple!  I heard it from them all!  We used magnetic dots to fill in the color spaces.  Once of Mrs. D's favorite games is the colored popsicle stick matching activity.  We used sticky paper on top of the cards so the sticks don't run away on us!  Pom pom sorting tub is also a favorite, as they all love to stuff the pom poms in the colored holes.

Shape Monsters are hanging in our room. Mrs. Hill and I adore them and don't want to give them up!  The kids use shapes of all kinds, sizes, and colors to make monster people.  They are so adorable!!!!  Spin art is so magical.  The kids can't believe that squirting paint onto a spinning piece of paper makes such beautiful artwork.  That is why they had to make 3 different ones.  They would make these for days if we could.  We made colored rings by putting beads onto paper ring clips.  The light table is fascinating.  They love stacking different colored tiles and things on one another to see new colors.  We place mirror stands on the light board and the magic doubles!  Colorama is a quick, fun game.  The water table was filled with craft foam colored dots to go along with our story, Press Here.  The sensory table was a soft pom pom delight.  There were pom poms of all sizes, colors and textures to scoop, drop, etc.  We played two kinds of matching paintbrushes games.

Ohh!!  Science experiments!!  The kids were in their glory with these activities!  We watched colored ice cubes melt to make single colors and mixed new colors.  They were surprised at how quickly they melted.  The Milk Experiment - We poured and inch or so of milk into a dish tub and added food coloring drops with eye droppers.  Then we dipped q-tips into dish soap.  When we touched the q-tips to the colors, they exploded!  We then placed a piece of water color paper onto the exploded colors to make milk prints.  Confession...the prints usually come out a bit better.  Not sure what was different this year.  It is still the process...not the product that counts!  Fizzy Colors - Kids are given their own tray filled with a layer of baking soda.  They then get the 3 primary colors of colored vinegar.  The kids used eye droppers (AM used these cool zig-zag droppers) to drop colored vinegar onto the baking soda.  Voila!  You get a fizzy reaction and the baking soda begins to turn into beautiful colors and designs.  Both classes played with these trays for well over 45 minutes!

During Circle Time and Language Group, we played tons of shape and color games and sang a lot of songs.  The shape train left the circle time rug station as each child had to present their shape ticket to come aboard!  We went around the room toot-tooting and chugging.  Mrs. D even used a wooden train whistle.  Mrs. Bailey made colored soup with the AM kids.  Maddy, cousin to Mary Had a Little Lamb made an appearance.  Her sheep are not white, like her cousin Mary, her sheep are colored!  They rolled in laughter each time a new colored sheep came out of the bucket.  More gumball fun with a giant gumball machine and paper gumballs.  Kids had to trade in coins to get gumballs for the machine.  Little White Rabbit showed us how she changed colors by dipping herself into colored paint cups.  She showered each time until she ran out of water and decided to stay a nice color of brown.  Mrs. D had a magic color box.  We learned that our eyes need light to see colors.  No light, no colors!

We stole one day away from our Colors and Shapes Unit to have a Pajama Party!  We did this the day before Winter Vacation.  We made pancakes to eat for snack and got to watch a Dora Nursery Rhyme video.

Nursery Rhymes Unit

Nursery Rhymes are always a hit in preschool.  Many of the children are familiar with at least a few rhymes and most children love all of the acting out and role playing we do!

Below you will see many Humpty Dumpty activities.  We had several kinds of puzzles to "put Humpty together again" and a math band-aid game to help with the eggshell cracks.  We got to match Humpty "belly" shapes and try to help Humpty across the wall with a magnetic wand without letting him fall off the wall!  Each kiddo got to try on the giant egg costume and sit on a paper block wall.  We had some real lively actors who dramatically "fell" off our wall!  Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star is always a hit and one most kids know well.  Mrs. Bailey has stars of different colors and textures to play with during Language Group.  Mrs. D played a star memory game and then we looked to the star on the ceiling.  We laid on our backs, darkened the room (as best we could!), and then Mrs. D used a flashlight on the ceiling.  We followed the star with our fingers and it even tickled our bellies!  We also learned about Little Jack Horner and his pies.  Our feet got naked as we learned the This Little Piggy rhyme with our bare piggy toes!

Little Miss Muffet, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, and Little Bo Peep came next!  We matched spider color and shapes to their web homes, found matching numbers on stools, and helped the spider climb up the water spout using colors and shapes.  We had spiders GALORE in our water table.  We "washed the spiders out" with a home-made funnel (made out of the top of a soda bottle and a small PVC pipe).  The kids loved piling the spiders on top of the floating dishtub, and then washing them off with the gush of water!  We practiced our handwriting by tracing spider webs (older kids) and spider lines (younger).  There was a Spider In, Spider Out game that can drive you crazy!  We spin the spinner to find out if we put a spider in the box of our game card, or take a spider out.  As you might have figured out, spiders were quickly flying in and out!  Sheep needed finding in a tub full of cotton balls, and then sorted by big and little.  We also helped the black sheep find their wool and played a number game to give our sheep some wool (cotton balls).

We acted out Little Miss Muffet over and over, as kids loved taking turns wearing the spider hat and pretending to eat the curds and whey.  Their favorite part?  Running away from the spider, screaming, of course!

Oops!  Another sheep game!  We filled our "three bags full" (actually 5 at a time), with the right number of cotton balls.  Jack Be Nimble would have been proud of our little preschool friends as kids  sorted the candle sticks from biggest to smallest.  They had great fun acting out Jack Be Nimble as they jumped over a real candlestick.  We then got a bit silly as we "walked around the candlestick, stood under it, jumped next to it" and so forth.  "Doggy, Doggie, Where's Your Bone?" at circle time was a hit.  We played this game to go along with Old Mother Hubbard.  One child was the dog who closed their eyes, while another child hid the coveted rubber doggy bone.  The "dog" got to guess three friends to see who was hiding their bone.  Below kids used tweezers to feed a dog small little white bones, they weighed real small and large doogie bones to see which ones were heavier or lighter, and they got to help the doggie get to his bone using a magnet.  Jack and Jill  made their appearance as well.  It is a good thing that we did not use real water in our bucket!  The kids did a wonderful job falling!  With some gentle guidelines, no one "broke their crown".  Hot Cross Buns were all the rage as the kids made playdough buns (Yes, they were green!!  I forgot to make brown playdough!!) and then put X crosses on them with pipe cleaners.  They traded their buns with real pennies!  Luckily, no one decided to take a bite!  We used the same green dough to make patty cakes with letters on them for Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker's Man.  We helped the mouse run up the clock (another magnet trick) after we sang, Hickory, Dickory, Dock about a 1000 times!  We also used a drum to beat out the "clock chime" during circle time.  Kids counted along with the drum beat to count the chimes.  Old King Cole, Merry, Merry Quite Contrary,  and The Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe were featured as well.

There were so many other activities that we could not show as we forgot to get "no face" pictures!  One favorite was making the Queen of Hearts tarts for our cooking project.  We rolled out bread dough, patted it into a muffin tin, and then put a dollop of strawberry jelly inside.  We baked them up and the kids gobbled them down.  The knave never got a chance to steal any!

Did you like the Little Boy Blue paper tube horns that came home?  I'm soooooo sorry for the noise!

We also made rain paintings for It's Raining, It's Pouring.  We also sent home their Jack and the Beanstalk plants (They were really pea plants, I couldn't find my green bean seeds!)  Mrs. Bailey had fun with the kids huffing and puffing, to blow the Three Little Pig houses down too!

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.