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!!