All About Our Silly Selves!

This week our topic was All About Me! We spent a lot of time working on writing and recognizing our names, both our own and reading our classmates' names. We spent time at a writing center doing rainbow names, where we used different colors to practice our names 3 times. Another center had us warming up our cutting skills turning long strips of paper into small squares. Then we traced our names in glue, and added the squares to make name mosaics. No pics here of that, since I really like to keep the kids' names private in pictures. We had fun, though!

Our big project for the week was the painting, clothing and taking care of our Mini Me! Tuesday, we looked at lots of skin tone paints, and chose the color closest to our own skin tone to paint our cutout.

Wednesday we chose clothes for Mini Me, and glued them on our cutouts. We also used mirrors to pick a matching hair color out of a bunch of yarn pieces. After all that dried, on Thursday we finished up the faces, and added some buttons to our clothes.

By Friday, our Mini Me friends were dry and ready to play! We listened to a story about Beekle, The Unimaginary Friend about an imaginary friend that was searching for a child to make him real. Then we used OUR imaginations to babysit our Mini Me all morning as we did our centers. We decided it might be fun if our Mini Me wore a clip, so they wouldn't forget what color group to sat with all day. Not one Mini Me lost a clip all day! :)

First, we drew a picture of what we imagined we might do if our Mini Me friends were real. We also took pictures together to add to our drawing. These will be the pages of our first class book (I'll post them later when finished.)

 

Our Mini Me friends also played with us at the people house rug center.

and while we strung beads and painted circle prints (for an art project next week)

Other Activities

It wasn't all about our Mini Me projects! We talked about the letter Mm, and made an amazing list of words that start with the /m/ sound. At circle time we gave the spinner a whirl, and shared a fun fact based on the color that was spun. We colored big M and little m, and covered them with macaroni. We used play dough to finish some faces, and enjoyed the sensory bottles while we waited for our friends to finish their centers. We played an alphabet bug game, and matched upper and lowercase letters. A super fun time was had with our dry erase funny faces! Using dry erase markers and crayons, we added all kinds of crazy features to our faces- mustaches, wings, hats, horns, designs, monster face pieces, and anything else we could think of drawing. It was wacky fun! (We also got some name practice at the bottom, but I blurred that out of the pictures.)

 

Finishing Up the First Week

By Friday, we were working and playing in our centers like we had been doing it for months! We made easy transitions, cleaned up well, and had fun with our "jobs"!

potato heads at the rug center

silly smile check

puppet play

Our first Let's Find Out magazine center- each week we do a literacy center using our class magazines. We work on letters, words, following along, and basic concepts of print such as directionality of text and one to one word correspondence.

just a dot, not a lot!

playing with our peeps in the people house

driving on letter, number and shape roads with cars and skateboards

stickers, crayons, and paper at the writing table

                                                            

After finishing our center job, we had time for stringing beads until it was time for a center switch.

Honk If You Love Preschool!- a circle time song that wakes everybody up :)

Our First Few Days

What a treat it has been getting to know this great new group of kids! We have been working on how to be a Pre-K kid this week: how to come in, get our folders out, sit at circle time, push in our chairs, play nicely, switch centers and HAVE FUN together. We are doing a great job!

The Letters on the Bus All Make a Sound flannel board/ singing

Calendars needed to go home Monday, so we started out by making some ABC bus pictures.

We decorated the first letter of our names, and have a beautifully decorated wall in our room.

                                      

We had a free painting center with watercolor paints. We did a wonderful job keeping the brushes in the right color paint.

We did a bit of building at centers. We made car tracks and buildings with the blocks, and used small building toys at the table.

 

Everyone has been asking for play dough, so we had a center for that on Tuesday.

After finishing our morning job, we've had fun at the kitchen. After finishing at Mrs. Horton's center, it's a blast to head to the sensory table!

After all that busy work at centers, we were hungry! Monday we celebrated a birthday, and Tuesday we worked on carefully pouring our own cups of water at snack time. 

Time for the playground!