Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Wacky Wednesday/ Green Eggs and Ham

It was a wacky Wednesday in our room today, and not just because of our bold fashion sense and wild hairstyles! Students were wandering the room looking for their name cards for morning work. Mallory? Dean? Chloe? Those aren't any of our names! Something crazy was going on- these were NOT our name cards! After deciding that we just better pick a new name to sit at so we could get our Ww handwriting done, we started noticing some other things that looked a bit wacky. We made a list for our morning message, since our regular morning message was upside down and a bit hard to read. We noticed the "February" label on the calendar was turned around, the chairs and table by the kitchen were upside down, our center chart was all wrong, and no less than FIVE different people had their shirts on backwards, including Ms. Heather and Ms. Horton! There were also lots of extra ponytails and braids- some girls had 3, 4 or 5 different ones all on the same head. Some people had pajamas on, some had mixed up shoes, and others wore lots of extra pants, ties, scarves and jewelry. After Ms. Heather checked her watch- conveniently located on her ankle, we just stopped making our list so we could read about someone else's wacky day in Dr. Seuss' Wacky Wednesday.  Then we were off to centers- sight word matching, placemats, lacing, wacky picture seek and find, and magnet fun.

looking for a matching name tag

sorting and matching sight words from Green Eggs and Ham

Silly Pictures- These laminated cards were FULL of wacky mistakes!


After centers, we read Green Eggs and Ham. Then we got to cooking in the classroom! First, Ms. Heather cracked a whole bunch of eggs into a bowl. We talked about how the yellow round part is the yolk, and the mostly clear goo is the white of the egg. Using a wisk, we mixed and mixed until the eggs looked all one color and we could not see any yolks or white anymore. Then we added some milk and green food coloring and kept on mixing (everyone wanted a turn- they were well wisked eggs)! Then we poured it into a BIG frying pan and added a bunch of chopped ham. This is where we hit the worst part of the day- the WAITING for them to finish cooking! To make the time go by (it was a big pan of eggs) we snacked on some cereal and listened to a cd reading of some Dr. Seuss books. Finally it was done! After a few bites, Ms. Heather asked everyone if they liked green eggs and ham (thinking in her head that a few were probably not going to like it/ be afraid to try it). The answer was "No, we don't like green eggs and ham. We LOVE them!" The only sad faces we saw were the friends who wanted second helpings and found out there just wasn't any more- we had eaten it all!












PS- Below are some pics from our work with Jonah and the Whale on Monday. I had left my camera at home that day, and forgotten until now that I had a few pictures on my phone of our painting, water play, and story retelling.






Oobleck!

We had some ooey gooey fun on Tuesday! After finishing Bartholomew and the Oobleck, by Dr. Seuss, we made some oobleck of our own with cornstarch, water and green food coloring.








When not oobleck-ing, we worked on our rainbow calendars for March. There was also time for some light box counting and sorting before we enjoyed a healthy snack.





A quick vote on our activities led to a discussion of more, less and how many. Then we were off to the playground and home!




Friday, February 22, 2013

More Taking Care of Teeth

We continued our dental health unit on Thursday and Friday with even more activities on taking care of our  teeth. We've worked- and played- hard this week!


Here we are playing a spinner game with bean "teeth" to see who could fill the mouth up first. Careful not to pull a cavity (black bean) out of the cup!

We looked for pictures of things that are healthy/ unhealthy for our teeth and put them together in class collages:



We flossed some sticky food (play dough) out of teeth (megablocks).

Everyone drew a healthy thing for teeth on a tooth shape to make our big healthy smile for the hall.


We worked on a book about good dental habits.

Here we are making tooth fairy wands to go with our circle time story about Mabel the Tooth Fairy.


The legos on the rug actually had nothing to do with teeth, but such a great wall built as a team is worthy of recognition! :)

Remember this? These are the eggs we soaked in fruit punch, soda, and vinegar earlier this week.


Today we worked to clean those stained teeth. We scrubbed with toothbrushes, water, and toothpaste.



Then we scrubbed some more....


And some more...


And still MORE scrubbing until they were as white as we could make them


None of them ever got as clean as they were before soaking in the drinks, but our hard work made them a lot better. We put them all out on the table, and took turns coming up to cast votes for which egg got the best scrubbing. In order to vote, we put a bean right next to the cleanest egg. After counting all the beans we found that 6 people agreed on the cleanest one, twice the amount of votes received by any other egg. J-- and C--- were the proud super scrubbers! Lesson learned: Don't forget to brush your teeth really well every single day.


After voting, it was time to take a look at the egg that had soaked in vinegar for 2 days. First, we passed around a plain hardboiled egg and talked about how it felt. Some of the observations were hard, smooth, and white. We were reminded that the hard shell protects the softer insides of the egg, just like the hard outside of a tooth - the enamel- protects the softer inside. Then the vinegar soaked egg was passed around. Boy, did that feel different!



Some of us thought it felt soft, squishy, even ICKY! The hard shell wasn't hard anymore. Nobody wants teeth like that.

We ended our day with some apple smiles for snack:


Have a great weekend, (and don't forget to brush!)