Winter Mittens!

It was such fun to come in Tuesday morning and see all our friends again after the long break! We spent our week playing, learning and laughing with Jan Brett's classic winter story The Mitten . Sometimes we read lots of different books about a topic, and learn a little from each one. Other times, like this week, we read one or two stories a bunch of times, and find something new or interesting among the familiar pages. Either way, there's nothing like a good book!

Tuesday, our mitten fun included painting right and left mittens for our January placemat. We tried to make them match as a pair- which can be pretty tricky for our eager painters sometimes!

We also read another Jan Brett book called The Hat, and made our own striped hats. We used crepe paper strips, and worked on laying out the strip, and estimating a piece just a little bit longer than our hat shape. After the glue dried, we trimmed the long edges and added a pom pom to the top. We'll hang these on our board with our mitten writing projects next week.

Our sensory table looks like a cold winter too! We have polar animals, snow, snowballs, mittens and gloves to enjoy this month.

 Mitten math! While we are pretty accomplished counters of a given set, we are working on making sets on our own. This can get tricky! First, we need to recognize the numeral, then we have to add stickers to match- making sure we keep that number in our head and recognize when to stop (that's the hard part!) Then we have to double check by counting our stickers, using one to one correspondence- which is a lot harder when the stickers we are counting are not all in a line. We did a wonderful job!

Cooperative story retelling! Our cooperative learning center on the rug for 2 days was our mitten story bucket. We had tiny trees, little animals, copies of the book and, of course, mittens to use to retell the story with our friends. We also had a blast making up our own stories using these props- those little animals had some wild adventures this week!

We started a multi day writing project this week. First, we painted a big mitten that asks "Who is hiding in my mitten?" 

Then, we searched through Ranger Rick and National Geographic Kids magazines for some interesting animals. We cut these out, and glued them onto snowy background paper. We made the snowy paper by painting with evergreen twigs- the splatter was incredible, so the camera did not come out to document that! :)

Next week, we'll work on using our sight words it, is, and a to build a sentence about the animals we chose to hide under our big painted mitten. Speaking of sight words, we practiced reading our retelling emergent reader at centers, and hope everyone enjoyed trying to read them with mom and dad too. Keep in mind, the kids are using memory patterns to "read" the words in most cases, not actual decoding skills, but it is an important step on the road to reading and should be celebrated!

Letter skills! We used an alphabet sheet to highlight different letters as Mrs. Horton showed us lowercase flashcards. We talked about the sounds, and used our ABC song to help us find the right one on the page.

Our wildest mitten fun happened at circle time with The Mitten Song! Each child pulled a story animal cutout out of Ms. Heather's big mitten. As we sang, anyone with the given animal crawled under our big blanket "mitten". After the mouse crept in, the bear gave his big sneeze and blew everyone out into the snow.

AH CHOO!