Healthy Teeth

This morning started out with some messy fun as we played with dinosaurs in shaving cream for our morning job (or blocks for the couple of us who thought that was just too gooey for first thing in the morning. :) ) Shaving cream is generally a big hit, and since we were going to be using it at centers in a way that did not allow for spreading it all over the tables, it seemed like a good idea to get some free play with it in first!

After reading about a trip to the dentist at circle time, we got started on our centers. Our math center was working with Mrs. Horton on making mouth models with 20 mini marshmallow baby teeth. We needed to count our teeth carefully, make sure that we had the same number of teeth for the top and bottom of the mouth, and place them carefully around the edge of our paper. 

 

For our language center, Ms. Heather worked with groups on our Let's Find Out magazine about teeth. We worked on making predictions, using picture clues, 1:1 spoken word to text correspondence, and reading words we know. We also talked about healthy choices for our teeth, and how we need to be extra careful to brush our teeth after sweet treats.

For our science center, we worked on brushing some giant teeth. Yesterday, we read a great story about a crocodile named Clarabelle who had so many big teeth that it took her all day to brush them. So today, we had some big teeth to clean. We used a bit of paint to get them nice and dirty, then used toothbrushes, water, and "toothpaste" (that shaving cream I mentioned earlier) to clean them up. The biggest lesson we took away was that you have to take your time to brush teeth carefully, because just a quick brush will NOT get all the food off, especially with all the bumps on the big back teeth. After some good scrubbing and a quick rinse we had gleaming teeth again!

After centers, we came back to the rug to compare teeth with eggs. We talked about how both are hard, white (when clean) and have a hard shell with a softer inside. This was all to introduce the idea that our teeth have a hard coating called the enamel that protects our teeth. We then set up a science experiment where we put several eggs in soda and fruit punch, to represent our teeth when we drink lots of sugary drinks. We'll leave these to soak overnight and see what happens to the "teeth" when they are not brushed for a day. One egg was also put into a jar of vinegar so we could see what happens when our enamel gets damaged. We'll continue our investigation tomorrow!

Hip Hip Hooray for 100's Day!

Today we celebrated a hundred days of learning! We have been getting ready bit by bit over the past week or so- making sticker strips for our hats, decorating glasses, adding numbers to our hundreds chart. Today it all came together for the big 1-0-0!

There was lots of excitement first thing this morning as everyone came in and tried on the hundred sticker hats and our fancy glasses.

At circle time we completed the last row of our hundreds chart, and Fred the Frog made the big leap to the end of the number line!

We all contributed ideas to the morning message:

Then, we worked out some of our wiggles by doing 100 exercises! We stretched our arms, kicked our legs, jumped on 2 feet, jumped on 1 foot, turned around, did jumping jacks, touched our toes, etc to burn lots of energy.

Our big activity was making the hundred piece snack mix. We used a big sorting placemat and our recipe cards we made on Wednesday to count out our snacks.

When we weren't counting snack, we chose among several activity choices: coloring, blocks, books, and the sensory table.

We boxed up the snack mix we carefully counted to take home, because there were plenty of leftovers to have at snack time, along with a special treat. After singing "Happy 100's Day to Us," we enthusiastically blasted our horns, ate our snack and went home a 100 days smarter!

Wednesday, Feb. 13

Today we started off practicing some Ee's for handwriting at our morning jobs. Lowercase e has been one of the trickiest letters to write for many of the students, and we will continue to practice, practice, practice! At circle time, 2 friends worked together to sequence the numbers from 71 to 80. We started last Monday doing 10 numbers a day, from 1 to 100. Then we all count together everything we have so far. We'll end up at 100 by Friday for 100's Day!

After all that counting, we split into groups for centers. This group used valentine stamps and rollers to create designs.

 

This group worked on making their recipe cards for our 100 piece 100 Day snack. Thank you so much to all our families for sending in the snack mix ingredients! Today, students worked on choosing the 10 ingredients for their custom snack mix. We glued pictures of each ingredient on a stand up recipe card that we will use when counting out our snack on Friday. Deciding on only 10 out of 16 choices was hard- everything sounds so yummy!

Our math center today was counting by tens with heart cutouts. These were glued on a long piece of crepe paper in order from 10 to 100.

We got a big lesson in cooperation with the super sliders over at the rug today in our cooperative play center! This game is jump-up-and-down fun, and only goes when we work together. There are 2 handles on each end of a long set of ropes. A plastic football shaped slider is strung on both ropes. In order to move it, one friend has to pull his/ her arms out wide, while the other friend keeps hands close together. After it zooms down the rope, you have to switch to send it back. It's harder than it looks! The children did a wonderful job of taking turns being the controllers, with 2 playing at a time, and the other 2 moving the ball to the end when it stopped in the middle (which it did a lot!)

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day- don't forget your cards!

We Love Hearts!

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, we have been using lots of hearts in our work! One morning, the kids came in to find hundreds of paper hearts on the tables. Their morning work job was to use those hearts to create something- an animal, person, vehicle, plant, or whatever they chose. No one was given glue to finish the job until he or she had plenty of time to shift hearts around and try a couple of different designs. It was surprisingly hard for some to get busy with so little direction, and the whole wide world of choices for their designs! But after some encouragement, we got some very creative pictures. The next day, we wrote "I love my ___." on a sentence strip to attach to our picture. Students copied the first 3 words, and got help, if needed, with the last. This was done one on one with a teacher, and we talked about remembering to put a space between our words and punctuation at the end of our sentence.

Our fabulous heart flamingos went along with our activities for the letter Ff both for flamingo and because you really had to follow the directions! This was a tricky directional craft activity that required them to go step by step carefully, instead of just grabbing glue and sticking down hearts. As you'll see below, there is still some personality to each flamingo, but the basic design is similar from one to another. Learning to follow directions carefully is probably one of the most important skills we can help the children develop before they head off to kindergarten! 

Below are some more picture highlights from the past few days:

open ended valentine making at a writing center

counting heart sets

Looking for pictures of things we like, and writing sight word sentences about them.

 Here we are working together to build with different kinds of blocks.

sensory table fun with heart shaped scoops, funnels, and the balance scale

 Of course, there is ALWAYS time for a good book!