Our Short Week After Winter Brea

Our week back from winter break was a short one, but action packed as always.

Miss Kate and I could not get over how much our students have grown and matured! We certainly were happy to see them back at school on Wednesday.

Wednesday and Thursday we started our Winter Unit. During music on Wednesday our morning class pretended to ice skate on paper plates for "freeze skating" (a new version of freeze dancing).

Both classes read our "January" poem. It's all about rhyming! Our afternoon class is getting so good at rhyming and we've been talking lately about beginning sounds of words. Something really quick and easy you can do in the car with your "not-so-little-one" (anymore!) is this:

Say a word like "mop" tell your child you will switch the "m" sound for  the "t" sound and ask them what the word is. For example, "mop" becomes "top". We will be working on this concept for the next few weeks in school. This is more so for the afternoon group but I'm sure some of our morning crew would catch on quickly too!

Other things we accomplished this week were, a letter search (snowman style), and a mitten match game. Students played a memory type game where they tried to find a matching mitten by color or pattern.

On Thursday, we substituted a science project in place of art, as we sometimes do. Children had a blast experimenting with ice cubes. We felt how they were hard, cold, melting, and creating water in our cups. We sprinkled food colored salt onto our ice cubes and noted how it made our cube melt. We held our ice cubes up and noticed that once it began to melt, the blue salt made it's way into the middle of our ice cubes! So much fun! (sorry for any blue hands at home!) We also squeezed red, warm, salt water onto our ice cubes and noted how that made the ice cube melt faster.

We're looking forward to a full week of fun this coming week! January already!
I keep reminding our afternoon group that they will soon be in Kindergarten! They are so ready!

Thank you so much to those of you who were so thoughtful over the holiday season. Many of you donated to our classroom and it is much appreciated.

Mrs. Reid