March Celebrations!

We had A LOT to celebrate this month! There were 3 happy birthdays, and our Easter Egg Hunt party. It is such fun to share these special days together!

 

Week of March 18

It was a mixed up week last week with our conference day and kindergarten orientation, but we still stayed very busy! We focused on color words and continued to work on our letters and sounds, along with a variety of other fun activities. We also celebrated Mrs. Horton's birthday (pics to follow on our monthly birthday post), enjoyed some beautiful days on the playground, and started work on a surprise for Daddy for our Donuts with Daddy day in April.

BINGO!- with upper and lowercase letters

 

Painting our color words, then finding stickers of the right color for each page.

Bam! Here we are using plastic hammers and bubble wrap to whack the letters we know. We buddied up with another class this day because many of our friends were at kindergarten orientation.

practicing our writing in our dry erase workbooks

playing Cariboo to find letters and count sets

We listened to a Pete the Cat book at the listening center. Everyone loved it so much we played the cd again during centers on Friday, just to hear him rock out about his many colored shoes!

 

We talked about the letter Jj, and decorated them with jewels.

Our morning work one day was turning a pile of miscellaneous art supplies into our own creations. We made rocket ships, family collages, gardens- all kinds of beautiful art! We also explored with water beads for a slippery and bouncy sensory center.

 

We had one last rainbow activity at centers on Friday- making rainbow fruit pizza! Every group was very proud of their creation. These pieces of art won't be in the backpack- they disappeared quickly at snack time!

Chasing bubbles in the breeze!

Step one of our special surprise required sanding. Make plans for Donuts with Daddy on April 12th! 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Wild Weather Science

The weather was on our minds in class today! First off, we read Eric Carle's Little Cloud.  We really enjoyed naming all the cloud pictures in the book. Then we watched a demonstration of rain clouds. Using an aquarium and water, Ms. Heather added a layer of "clouds" with shaving cream. Using liquid watercolor, Ms. Heather added more water to the clouds until it began to "rain" into the clear water under the clouds.

It was pretty exciting to see the rain! To build in with our work with rainbows and color, yellow was then added to our clouds:

 There were plenty of oohs and ahhs as the rain changed to green!

Then we were off to centers for some more weather work. At the cloud center, everyone had their own cup of water and shaving cream to create rain. Red, yellow and blue watercolor was dripped on top using droppers, and allowed us to see some new colors being formed.

leaning down to look at the bottom lets us see the rain colors mix

red + yellow = orange

blue+ red = violet/ purple

We had tornado tubes at another center. We talked about how tornados are very fast windstorms. Many remembered the sirens for a recent tornado warning, and we talked about how we need to listen to our parents right away when they tell us to move to a safe inside place when the siren goes off. Since it would be much too dangerous to go outside during a real tornado, we used the tornado tubes to see the twisting pattern of the wind.

Our third weather center was based on our story time book Little Cloud. Using white paint and sponge painters, we created our own cloud shapes. Then we completed the sentence about our picture.

Our last center today was working on color words with the magnet trays:

After centers, we mixed some colors in water cups placed on the overhead projector. We used the red, yellow and blue to make green, orange, and violet again. Then, we experimented with some other combinations and made brown, a murky light green and that mysterious new color we learned about in our Roy G Biv song about rainbow colors- indigo (purple added to the blue cup).

Below are some pics from activities we did earlier in the week:

rolling painting to make our shamrocks for our parade sashes

Painting rainbow hair- you can see the finished works in the hall!

counting leprechaun treasure

using rainbow colors of tape to create rainsticks/ shakers

making rainbows with flashlights and prisms

To watch the Roy G Biv video at home, click on the link below:

video of Roy G. Biv by They Might Be Giants