Week of Jan. 7 - 10

This week in Preschool our theme was winter! We have spent some time talking about the changes that winter brings to our environment and also spent some time playing fun winter themed games.

This week in groups, we worked on building our names (for A.M students) using puzzle peice letters, rhyming (for P.M students) finding rhyme matches and double checking our work by seeing if puzzle peice rhymes fit together. These of course were our literacy games. We also played a snowflake match game (much like a memory game) where students had to find two snowflakes that looked alike. We also read a fun book called "Snowmen At Night" by Caralyn Buehner then made up our own snowman stories as a shared writing activity. A shared writing activity is when children think up the ideas and Mrs. Reid writes them all down for the kiddos to see! They were a riot!

For our art project this week, we used black, brown, and orange oil pastels to create a snowman drawing then we dipped cotton balls into white paint to make our snowman scene look snowy! So cute and fun! They have been hung up near cubbies for your viewing pleasure!

Next week we will continue talking about winter but our focus will be on bears and other hibernating animals. We will read "The Three Little Bears" and have some fun with our book! Looking forward to a week that is not too crazy, not too dull, but JUST RIGHT! :)

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