Pajama Day 2015!

Friday was a rainy cool winter day- perfect for our annual Pajama Day! After some playtime in our pjs, we all headed over to Fellowship Hall to curl up on our blankets, eat some popcorn and watch "Bear in the Big Blue House" and "The Talking Words Factory". It was a great day!

Fun with Jan Brett Books!

This week we played and learned with Jan Brett books! We read The Mitten and The Hat at circle times, and then used those books for lots of center fun.

This is our story bucket for The Mitten- we used the board book, small plastic animals and a bunch of mittens and gloves to tell our own stories to each other.

We used paint dotters to practice making sets on mini mittens.

We sang a song about the story, and played a game where we climbed in a big mitten outline when our animal came up in the song. When the bear sneezes, we all jumped out!

We played with polar animals in shaving cream snow and our water bead and ice cube polar seas.

Our Let's Find Out science magazine was all about the real animals featured in the story.

We did two art projects- mittens and hats!

For the hats, we practiced estimating- laying crepe paper over our hat shape and cutting about what we thought we might need to make stripes. We did this 4 or 5 times, then glued everything down to make striped hats. A pom pom for the top, and a careful trim around the back to clean off long edges, and we had some great hats!

Our mittens took most of the week to finish! We started by painting a white paper mitten. Then, Ms. Heather and Mrs. Horton laminated them and punched holes around the edges. Using bright yarn, we worked on our fine motor control by lacing through all the holes. These were stapled on a blue background covered with snow prints.

Now, on to our writing! To answer the question on the front of our mitten "Who's hiding under our mitten?", we cut out animal pictures from magazines. Then we wrote out the answer to the question and hid our picture and writing under the mitten. Writing in preschool is different for each student. Some are ready to use the letters and sounds to make words, and some are not. For our writing this week, some children knew the first letter, some knew the whole word, and some got lucky and saw the word next to the picture they cut out :) . Generally, we do writing one on one with the teacher. For most, I stretched out the sounds in the word, and we worked together to figure out what letters might make those sounds. If a child is not ready for this, I would dictate the letters, or in the case of uncertainty with letter identification, write it out and let the child copy it. It's all good practice! 

NOTE: Not surprisingly, just going by phonics led to some misspelled words. That is a-ok with me. When a child is hesitantly building confidence with letters and sounds, you won't ever catch me arguing about a wrong letter here and there, especially when I sit there dazzled by the proud smiles of a child writing words!