Friday, November 30, 2012

Highlights from 11/28-11/30

We had some fun math, language and holiday activities over the past few days!

In our math centers, we used picture, numeral, and dot dominoes to make matches and we built Christmas trees by ordering paper strips from longest to shortest.


We also worked on "unpainting" shapes at circle time, and creating shape pictures with magnets.



We had some very busy letter builders on the carpet! Using our set of straight and curved letter builder pieces, we made lots of letters (and numbers) that we checked using our circle time carpet. The rug was especially handy for figuring out some of the tricky ones, like the capital B!



We had some fun art projects too! We drew candy cane shapes with a pencil at morning work, then used red and white paint to cover the lines with fingerprints. These will be our December placemats. We also carefully cut out tracings of our hands and used them to make reindeer antlers. Lastly, we laced paper cutouts to make stockings to hang up in class. Check out the fancy stretch of blanket stitching on A's Christmas stocking!



Last, but most certainly not least, we had a birthday celebration this week! Another friend turned 5, and brought in some yummy chocolate and pretzel treats for us to enjoy. Happy Birthday to you!







Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Ready, Set, READ!

Welcome back! We got right back in the swing of things this week, and even kicked it up a notch as we started sounding out words to READ! At circle time we talked about the sounds of Aa and Tt, and started saying them one after another. It wasn't long before a few students noticed we were saying the word "at". After that, it was a hop, skip and jump to our new big "AT" family flip book! We added the sounds for c,b,f,s,p,r, m and h to make CAT, BAT, FAT, SAT, PAT, RAT, MAT and HAT.  Don't think we took the easy way out and used just pictures to tell us the word- Ms. Heather did not show us the picture until after we read the word.  In addition to rhyming word families, we will be starting on our color words this week. First up are red and green, in honor of the season.  Of course, it will take lots and lots of practice and repetition of sounds and blending before we notice and read all the words around us, but watch out Kindergarten- we are on our way!

For centers today, we got to work on our calendars for December. This month, our calendar will help us count to Christmas as we add cotton balls one by one to make Santa's beard. We used templates to trace and cut out a face and hat, and attached our calendar as the beard. Some button eyes and soft cotton trim and mustache, and we had our Santa! Watching the children do all this by themselves showed Ms. Heather and Mrs. Horton how far we have all come from the first days of school when it was hard to cut on a big wide line, much less a skinny pencil line we traced ourselves. We are so proud of all the kids' efforts and hard work!
 

Our language center had the Leap Frog phonics toys. Some students practiced single letters and sounds, and others used the 3 letter ones to try making those "at" words on their own.

In order to make Santa's beard on our calendar, 
we each had to count out 24 cotton balls at our math center to take home for gluing.

Our rug center was the kitchen set and dishes. We had chefs, shoppers and tea parties going on today. In a few days Ms. Heather will be taking this center out to make room for our Christmas tree, so we wanted to make sure we got over there to play one more time!





Friday, November 16, 2012

Farm Field Trip!

Today was a great day on the farm! We met out at Ottawa Farms in Bloomingdale. First off, we heard a little bit about all the fruits and vegetables grown on the farm. Then we loaded up on the trailer for a hay ride to the corn maze:

Then, we wandered our way through the giant corn maze. The corn was really tall all along the path, but no one got lost!



Once we made it out of the maze, it was time for another hay ride over to the Ottawa Speedway for some pig races!




Then, we got a chance to play on all the fun equipment. There were pumps and pipes for duck racing, a barrel ride, steer roping, and a big climber. We also could get a closer look at some friendly goats.









It was a wonderful trip!!





Thursday, November 15, 2012

Thanksgiving and the Harvest

Monday, we had a a day that was all about CORN. Of course, first we talked about the letter Cc and how it likes to make different sounds. We have friends in class whose first or last names start with a C that makes a hard sound like K, a soft sound like S, AND the combination sound of CH. It makes it a little confusing, but we will keep coming back to it all year long!

We started out with a telling of the legend of the 5 corn kernels, a story of how the pilgrims had a hard first winter, with very little to eat. After learning how to plant corn and other crops, they celebrated the harvest the next year with the first Thanksgiving. In remembrance of those lean times, they placed 5 corn kernels by their plates each year. We made our own paper about the story, so we could take it home to share with our families.

In our math center, we made corn stalks with corn kernels glued on to match sticker numbers.

In the art center, we used corn cobs (both with and without kernels attached) to paint.

Our sensory table has had corn in it for a while, and we added beans, rice and farm animals this week.
                                                  

At snack time, we taste tested 2 kinds of popcorn: kettle corn with sugar and salt, and hot air popped corn with butter and salt.



Then we added our picture to the graph to compare our favorites. It was pretty close, but more people liked the fresh popped corn with butter and salt!

We have been very busy with Thanksgiving activities every day this week. We will be pilgrims in the Thanksgiving program next week, so we added some fall details to our large white collars. We made Mayflower handprint pictures for a class book we are making, and enjoyed our Mayflower pretend play center and flannelboard pieces.

 

 

We have had Thanksgiving themed math and language building centers, such as number sequencing, letter matching, reading, phonics and fine motor practice in our practice workbooks. We also read our Let's Find Out magazine about how pilgrim and Wampanoag children lived.
 

  

There were also lots of turkeys: on the flannelboard, in our art and in the hall!