Jingle with Joy!

As soon as we came in the door this week after Thanksgiving break, we jumped right in to getting ready for Christmas! Our elves have lots to do to decorate, make presents, and learn carols in addition to practicing those color words, letters and learning our teen numbers.

The number one reason for all this holiday joy is the birth of Jesus- Pastor Andy came to visit and read us the story of the very first Christmas.

We've been learning about the letter Jj, and made nativity pictures to remind us to

"Jingle with joy for Jesus!" We also cut out and painted stripes on J to turn around into a candy cane.

    

Both our nativity sets and Christmas tree have been favorite cooperative learning centers all week. We have decorated and undecorated our tree lots of times, and love to use the angels at the nativity to remind everyone to "BE NOT AFRAID!" (Angels always say that first.)

 

We spent a lot of time working on our singing this week, because in a few weeks we will be angels in our holiday program. We made some little angels to decorate our room.

Color words are important sight words! We colored in a sight word reader about Christmas lights, and read them together as a class. Keep practicing at home!

We used Christmas number cards at circle time to count sets and sequence numbers up to 15.

Last but not least, everyone loves to play in the sensory table! Our materials for this month are green and red pasta, stockings, jingle bells and nativity finger puppets.

Our Tt Party!

We had a great week! Thanksgiving is just around the corner, so we started off the week learning about the Mayflower and pilgrims. We finished up several Thanksgiving projects, including our Turkey wreaths. Each morning for the past couple of weeks, we have cut out hand outlines. Wednesday, we each used one hand cutout from each of our friends to make a "Thankful for our Friends" turkey. These came home Friday, along with our pilgrim picture frames, owls and nature collages from last week.

Tt was our focus letter, and we did a terrific job learning how to write it and make the sound. On Tuesday, we had a grand Tea Party! Using real cups and saucers, we drank hot tea and ate toast together, and other than handling the toaster, did everything ourselves. From adding sugar cubes (one lump or 2?), spreading butter, to washing dishes and setting the table, we took care of the details like big kids! After we finished, we wrote some Tts on our (paper) tablecloth.

Our letter turkeys needed some matches made between upper and lowercase letters! 

Using a magnet wand, we dug capital letters out of the turkey corn to lay on our turkey mats with the lowercase letters. 

We ended our Tt Party day with a round of our new favorite song and dance: Tooty Ta!

Other Thanksgiving fun included flannel boards and playing with our big Mayflower and people.

We used tools (magnifying glasses and rulers) to explore all kinds of nature items. 

As a sweet ending to the week, we made yummy pinecones out of pretzels, cereal and a little frosting glue- delicious!