Our Herd of Elephants!

We focused in on the tricky letter Ee this week, along with our regular math and literacy learning! Helping us along all week was our book friend Elmer the Elephant.

We cut out 1 large and 2 small gray hearts, and covered them in a patchwork pattern of colorful squares to make elephant masks. Our fine motor control continues to improve- we are learning to use folded paper to make hearts- which will come in very handy in February. :) Our masks turned us into a herd of wild elephants!

Of course, you can't read Elmer books without practicing the letter Ee. This is always a tricky one- the lowercase e is hard to write, and the sound can be hard to distinguish from other vowels. We especially had a fun time holding up big paper ears every time we heard an Ee word in the book Ella the Elegant Elephant- it was chock full of Ee words! We practiced our writing by making enormous E and e patterns on a sentence strip. You might hear your child echo Ms. Heather while writing Ee's- "big line down, little line at the top, at the bottom, and back in the middle" or 

"little line across, Up and Around!" We talked and wrote our letters out loud a lot until we got it. :) We also used the big spinner to have a race to the top between E,e,Q, and q- lots of letter practice at those races!

 

We made some stretchy Ee books this week! 

Our long and short Ee pics all fit along the elephant's long trunk.

Some of our other centers this week were making our fancy flamingo calendars for February, cutting hearts for our placemats, counting sets, magnet letters and word builders, and the return of kitchen center (our igloo went away for the winter). If we had some free time after finishing our center job, it was always fun to head over to the red table and make some colorful patchwork patterns or elephants with friends!

Friday, we did some class cooking and made- what else?- elephant ears! We took a long strip of  bread dough, and rolled and flattened from one end, then rolled and flattened a round coil from the other end. A little bit of melted butter, and some cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top finished them off before baking in the oven for a warm Ee snack. Yum!

Our last stop of a great day is playground!