Centers

Most days, we spend the middle part of our morning at several learning centers. While there are several ways to organize centers, our class usually operates on a structured rotation of  4 activities. There will always be a cooperative learning center, usually on the rug. This might be the kitchen center, or blocks, trucks, legos- something that is very open ended and gives the option to work together or on one's own. The goal of this center is to give the children time to move and play while interacting with one another in a positive way. In the past week, we've had our people house, blocks, and the potato heads (also done at the table) out in our rug center.

Over the course of a week, our other centers will usually cover language, math, science or social studies, fine motor skills, sensory experiences and arts/ crafts.  2 of these will be teacher assisted, which gives us a chance to work with the kids on important skills in a very small group. This week we started focusing on the letters Aa and Mm. We talked about these at circle time, and made a fun Aa for Alligator and Mm for Mouse activity at centers. We also worked on print concepts and sight words in our Let's Find Out magazine.  We continued to work on how to use school materials/ fine motor by making glue and glitter pictures and using play dough. We've also been working on writing our name on all of our papers- practice makes perfect!

We've been doing a lot of counting and number sense activities as circle time, but we also spent some time this week with puzzles and the cube manipulatives at our math centers.

Our social studies and art activities this week have been "All About Me". Mirror self portraits were made by painting while we looked in a mirror. We made our Mini Me people over the course of a couple days. First, we painted a child cutout a chosen skin tone. All of us are a little bit different, and everyone picked out the shade of paint that he or she felt was closest to themselves. The next day we added hair, eyes, and clothes. On Wednesday, we imagined where we might like to go and what we might do with a Mini Me friend, and drew a picture to match (Ms. Heather recorded our description of our adventures). These projects will be assembled together into our first two class books to be enjoyed all year long! Below is a sneak peek, but check back soon for pictures of each page....