Teeth

Our topic for this week was Teeth!!  First we sat in a circle and passed around Polly, (a puppet made out of a wooden spoon, when we have her we get to share our ideas, otherwise it's our turn to listen to other's ideas).  We all told what we knew about teeth.  I worte all the ideas down on our whiteboard.

Then we heard a really good pop up book called, Brush Your Teeth, Please! about animals who brush their teeth.  My favorite page had a pop up shark with dental floss that we could use to floss the shark's teeth!  We also heard a story about The Tooth Fairy.  During activity time we played a math game and turned over cards with numbers on them to tell us how many marshmallows to put inside of our game cards which were animal mouths.  We had fun counting, adding and subtracting.  We showed the kids how to count on and we wrote out number sentences for them.  They loved learning about the plus, minus and equal signs, but mostly they loved being able to eat marshmallows while we were playing the game.  (A great subtraction game:  child's name has ____ marshmallows (or cheerios, or fruit snacks or whatever.)  S/he ate 2 how many are left?  Then write down the equation, see if your child want's to try and copy it???)  We made and decorated toothbrushes during this time too!

On Wednesday we thought of animals that have teeth and we passed Polly around the circle again and listed everyone's ideas.

Next we heard a really good story about sharks!  Ask your child what they learned about sharks, we discussed the book after we read it and the kids knew quite a bit about sharks!!

A new student joined our class today.  Welcome Knox McFarland!!  We're so happy to have a new friend join our class!!  We spent some time playing name games today and getting to know one another!

During activity time Mrs. Chyko did marshmallow math with the kids and Mrs. Gould worked with the kids as they counted out and glued down 20 marshmallows to use as a hippo teeth!  We also had kids working at the train table, playing with cars, coloring, playing in the kitchen center, and building with various kinds of blocks!

Thursday we heard the story Tooth Trouble and talked about how to take care of our teeth.  We talked about going to the dentist and brushing and flossing.  We also made the letter T using mosaic squares with Mrs. Chyko, used toothbrushes to paint with on a tooth shape with Mrs. Gould and played with playdough with Mrs. Bulgerin!

It was cold this week so we stayed inside for movement.  One day we got out our parachute and played a game called bumping and jumping the chute as well as roller ball.  (we put a ball in the center of the parachute and tried to keep it on the chute as we rolled it around....a very big hit!!)  Another day we used bean bags and moved to the cd "Bean Bag Boogie" and finally we pretended we were animals in the zoo while we moved to "Animal Action".  Mrs. Jenkins had us playing the hokiie pokie in music and we sang head, shoulders, knees and toes!!

Penguins

On Tuesday we finished our snowmen by adding buttons, mittens, scarves, and carrot noses.  We also talked about the letter e and had fun using cheerios and glue to make e's.

We began talking about penguins and heard the story "Tacky the Penguin".  In case you've been hearing your kids singing silly songs like "How many toes does a fish have?" it's because thats what Tacky liked to sing.  The kids really enjoyed listening to the story, ask them to retell it to you!!  

To get ready for our project we talked about the color of the sky, is it always blue?  Then we talked about sunsets and sunrises and the colors we see in the sky.  I showed the kids a picture I took of the suncrise on the way to school this morning.

We decided we'd paint a sunrise at the South Pole to create a background for penguin.  The kids used watercolors to create a sunset.  The next day we talked more about penguins, heard the book "5 Little Penguins" and then we used construction paper to create our penguin and glue him onto the background.  

We also added some glue and salt to add a little texture and sparkle to the project!!

Wednesday we went outside to play in the snow!!

Thursday we had so much fun coming to school dressed in our pj's.  We shared our stuffed animal during circle time, ate pancakes with syrup, an orange slice and hot chocolate and we had music with Mrs. Jenkins.  We heard the story "The Snowman" and acted it out as it was read.  We had a great week!!  Plan to see you all soon!!

Winter

It was so nice to see the kids again after the holiday break!!  The first day back we heard some good stories about Winter and made snowflakes out of foam.  Look for them in our Maple Tree!!  We talked about where the antarctic and arctic are located and what animals live there.  We made a list of all the animals we could think of, then we went out and looked at our sand table and saw that it was ransformed into an arctic/antarctic landscape filled with snow (potato flakes), igloos, inuits, and polar animals!

The kids couldn't wait to get to this center during activity time!!  We added cotton balls to our train table so the kids could set up a snowy village and plow the snow out of the way for the train to get through!!  We used play dough to create snowmen and played with the cars and blocks!

On Thursday we celebrated Mika's half birthday.  She is now officially 3 and 1/2!!  She brought in frosted pink and purple sugar cookies in the shape of a crown and shoes.  We had pink juice and fruit snacks too, thanks for the YUMMY treat, Mika.  We all loved it!!  We also had fun wearing party hats and using our blowers at snack time.  It's also so much fun to celebrate birthdays at school!!

After snack we went into the reading room and then we went and had music with Mrs. Jenkins.  We

heard some really good stories about snowmen and then we used marshmallows and white paint to make our very own snowmen.  We did the painting today and when we come back next week we'll add the face, nose and other things we need to finish our snowmen!  

Have a great week-end everyone!!