Fun in The Sun!

We've enjoyed the sudden jump into some warm sunny spring days! In addition to some wild bubble times, we also worked on writing outside with sidewalk chalk.

Classics like Rainbow Fish and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom have been read before jumping into art, language, and math centers. Curious George at the Seashore was a fun I SPY game center, and our beach sensory bin has seen quite a few sandcastles, seashell hunts and imaginative play.

Our last few focus letters for the end of year were Xx, Yy, and Zz. We spent a good part of one morning fascinated with a series of animal cards and X-rays. We matched animals, looked at bone structures and marveled at how so many animals remind us of dinosaurs!

Our kids have been asking and asking for our vet box to come back out, so we enjoyed that for a few days as our cooperative learning center on the rug.

We also celebrated our summer birthday friends! It's fun to turn "almost 5!"

Save the Rainforest!

We continued learning about some rainforest critters this week!  We learned about life cycles, did some writing, some reading, some crafting and some playing with fascinating froggy friends. Our color words came in handy for some other rainforest creatures- rainbow snakes and mixed up chameleons.

Building sight word sentences that match a frog picture:

We painted our own frog shapes, and wrote a sentence about the colors. Sometimes we needed to copy the words, sometimes we sounded it out, and sometimes we already knew it. We also are learning about spacing, letter formation and direction. Writing is tough stuff!

Learning about life cycles- frogs make dramatic changes as they go from egg to adult:

The frog pond was a favorite this week! Lily pads floating on the thick slippery pond hid lots of frogs, tadpoles and the hard to find clear eggs (water beads).

Easter is past, but those colorful plastic eggs make a great rainforest snake AND give us a great reason to work on fine motor control as we try to get the pipe cleaner through the teeny tiny hole on the egg halves.

Our rainbow painted paper plates help the chameleon change colors as we spin the top wheel:

Earth Day was this week! We made a picture of our planet, read The Lorax (and ate some yummy truffula trees for snack), learned about recycling, and created some wonderful trash to treasure art.

Our class did the April school bulletin board:

Back from Spring Break!

It was so good to see all our friends again this week after a long break! We jumped right in with the tricky letter Uu. Everyone wants to say "Yoo" for the sound, and we had to really work on that short sound for the letter. We'll get it though- it just takes practice. We spent 2 days learning with "The Umbrella" by Jan Brett. We made our own retelling prop, read other stories about rainforest animals, and had a creative time with our bucket of rainforest animals and tiny umbrellas. We also made our own unicorn books about long and short Uu words. Our listening center this week was "The Underwear Zoo". We had to really listen to know when to turn the page, and that can be tricky when we are laughing at such a silly story! Some of our other centers were about our Mother's Day surprises, so I can't give you details or pics about that just yet....