Farms

Here are the kids eating mud! Don't worry it's just chocolate pudding and oreos! Afterwards we compared our mud with real mud.










We read Sheep in a Jeep and found all of the words that rhymed with sheep. Some of the words were hard for them like steep, weap, leap, and cheap but it was a good vocabulary lesson!

We also made butter! Fill a baby food jar with heavy cream and small amount of salt. Seal it tightly and pass it around in a circle allowing students to shake it. It will make a small amount of butter that you can put on crackers for the students.

Fairy Tales

Time for princes, princesses, kings and queens! We started the week off by discussing "What is a fairy tale?" We made a list of traits that we see in many fairy tales. I wrote them inside of a castle. 

 Our writing activity for the week involved 2 prompts. The boys were asked to finish the sentence "One day, I found a magic seed..." The girls were asked to finish "If I had a fairy Godmother..." Their answers were great! Very creative!

 

After reading two different versions of The Frog Prince, we asked the class if they would be willing to kiss a frog? It was very split!

 Our second writing activity for the week was to write letters to fairy tale characters! We wrote to many Disney characters! We are still waiting for our reply!

Halloween

These are just a few of the ideas we used for Halloween. 

We read a Dora book, The Halloween Cat, and discussed the parts of the story. This was our first attempt and sequencing and recalling events from a story this year. The students did a great job because Dora books are pretty repetitive. I'm sure you can use any Halloween story for this activity. I asked students to remember something that happened at the beginning, the middle, and at the end of the story and wrote down their responses. The book was handy to look at pictures in case I had any blank stares. They did really well with this!

 

 We read Stellaluna and discussed some things that we learned about bats from the story. I wrote down one bat fact that they told me. They drew the eyes and mouth and we hung them upside down in our classroom.

 We did a pattern activity with haunted houses and Halloween stickers. Students were able to choose 2 Halloween items for their patterns. The teachers wrote down what they chose in the rhyme. We only focused on AB patterns.

 

We read There's a Nightmare in my Closet. We talked about how the monster wasn't really scary. In fact, the monster was scared of the kid! We listened to Maybe the Monster by Justin Roberts. What a fun song! After that, we made our own nightmares and put them in our closets. The students loved being able to create silly monsters. There were no rules! They could have 2 heads, 4 eyes, 8 legs... whatever they wanted! We got some really great pictures out of it and I know they enjoyed it!

Fall

 The leaves are changing and we're enjoying every minute of it! Here are some fun things we did to learn about Fall! We did 2 different investigations! First we examined an apple, inside and out, and described everything we saw and tasted! Then we did the same with a pumpkin. The pumpkin was much messier and I had to count the seeds on my own since there were over 500! (I would have easily lost their attention after awhile.) All in all, both investigations were a lot of fun and we were able to use great describing words, learn about how pumpkins and apples grow, and get a little messy too! 

 We took a trip to the pumpkin patch! It's always a lot of fun learning about the pumpkins and seeing some cool animals too! The giraffes are my favorite!

 We did out first measuring activity and compared how big we were against apples and pumpkins. It is neat to see the other classrooms and even teachers and parents measuring themselves as well! They realized quickly that they were more apples tall than pumpkins tall!

 We made a list of everything in Fall that could be red, orange, or yellow. Then they chose something from each list and drew their own pictures. It was fun coming up with the lists!

 We measured the pumpkin we got from the pumpkin patch with unifix cubes. First we took guesses on how tall it was and then we used the cubes to measure it. We had some close guesses!

We went on a nature walk outside and collected leaves in ziploc bags. The students used the leaves for sorting activities, and art projects. They loved taking the leaves home although I'm sure their parents weren't as thrilled! ;)

Back to School

It's back to school time! Here's some things we did in Preschool this year! We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and decorated trees with how many letters that were in our names. I also printed out a tree, taped it to a cookie sheet, and added it to our ABC center to use with the magnetic letters. The students loved acting out the story with the letters!

 We read the Kissing Hand and discussed how we felt on the first day of school. Some students were excited while others were scared. We talked about how our Moms and Dads love us even when we're at school!

 This is just a Back to School display outside the door! Love my good apples!

 We did an All About Me Glyph! Students decorated people according to the code. We learned about each other and made some nice looking students!

 We made emotion masks! Students took home a mask to be happy, sad, angry, and silly. They loved playing with these! We discussed how it is okay to feel angry or sad but it's not okay to hurt others or throw tantrums. Students learn to deal with these emotions in our class by using the calm caddy and talking to the teacher. Another activity we did to learn about emotions was playing with self-control bubbles. I blew bubbles and allowed the students to pop them as they pleased. Then I explained that this time I blow the bubbles, we have to try as hard as we can not to touch them. I blew as many bubbles as it took for all the students to sit still. We talked about how it was really hard but when we did it, we were really proud of ourselves. This is also something I will do from time to time when I feel students are needing a refresher.

 This was a fun lesson on how to sit during circle time. We labeled the nice sitting child and tried to sit just like him. He's been sitting with us for over a month and I still refer back to him as the best sitter on the carpet!

 We read Pete-the-Cat, or sang it rather, and made our own cats! They colored the shoes whatever color they liked!

This was a cute art craftivity I saw on Pinterest. Meet Roy G. Biv!

Dr. Seuss

March 2nd is Dr. Seuss' birthday! To celebrate, we dedicated each day of the week to a different Dr. Seuss book!

Monday- Green Eggs and Ham- Wear green
Tuesday- The Foot Book- Wear silly socks or shoes

Wednesday- Wacky Wednesday – Wear wacky clothes!

Thursday- One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish- Wear red or blue

Friday- Cat in the Hat – Wear hats

 

We read Green Eggs and Ham and then tried some green eggs! Then we made a graph to show if we like the eggs or not!

After reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, we used colored goldfish to sort and graph. Then we got to eat them of course!

We brought in two items that rhyme and did a share circle about our items!

On Wednesday, we read Wacky Wednesday and counted the wacky things in the book. When the class went to gym, I made our room wacky by flipping chairs, and putting my shoe on a table! We changed the month to say July and turned posters upside down! Each wacky thing was labeled with a number on a post-it note. When they came back, they found something that was wacky and took the post-it note. Then we put the numbers in sequential order. 

Community Helpers

There was so much do to for community helpers! We had a blast with this theme! Again, most of these ideas came from pinterest and just tweaked them to make them work for my class!

I cut a long piece of white paper and taped on the table. Then I glued large buildings, people cut outs, and their equipment to the paper. I had the students color the mural together with crayons. The students had a lot of fun working together on this project. They also enjoyed pointing out which part of the picture they colored. Together we made something great!

One day, the students came to school dressed as a community helper. (I had a few back-up options for anyone who forgot). We took pictures of the students all dressed-up and then made a list of clues about their job. People passing in the hallway could read the clues, then lift the page to see if the picture matches their guess! They had so much fun dressing up and seeing their pictures reminds them how much fun they had!

We brainstormed all the reasons we might have to take our pets to the vet! Then the students chose a dog or cat and colored it. They put a bandaid somewhere on their pet and the teachers asked, "What happened to your dog/cat?" We wrote down their responses and glued it under their colored picture.

I made “pancakes” out of brown construction paper and wrote CVC practice words on the back. Students took turns flipping the pancakes with a spatula and reading the word. Then they can found that word on their practice spelling worksheet and wrote it down. It was an interactive, fun way to practice sounding out words and handwriting!

We made mail trucks for an art project and then we picked a friend and wrote a letter to them. The letters said, "Dear ______, You are a good friend! Love, ________" Students had to write by themselves but they were able to look at an example while writing. Then we put the letters in envelopes and added a stamp! We put the letters in our mailbox and at the end of the day the "mailman" picked them up! At the end of the week, the letters were delivered to the mail trucks we made in art earlier in the week! By then, the kids had forgotten about the letters and were so excited to see mail in their mail trucks!

Other ideas:

• We had a lot of special guests visit our classroom! Throughout the week we had a firefighter, police officer, army soldier, nurse, and a banker speak to our class. There's nothing better than a hands-on learning experience!
• To be chef's, we brought in a bread maker and made yummy bread! We also made puppy chow!
• We did a lot of fire safety practice after the firefighter came to our classroom!