Making Butter and Tractors

Last Friday, Joan and I went to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Conference.  One of the ideas that we took away from the conference was to have a "question of the day".  The idea behind this is to help increase children's vocabulary in a fun way.  We're trying to take a word or idea that we discussed from class the day before and then turn it into a question.  Last week we incorporated the words migrating butterflies, bitter cold, crunchy pumpkin seeds and baby raccoons called kits. We learned that it generally takes an average of hearing a word 30 times before it is incorporated into a child's mind!

On Thursday we heard the story A Visitor for Bear about a bear who was trying to make breakfast for himself when a mouse kept showing up in his kitchen.  Ask your kids if they can tell you more about the story, they were all laughing as we read this.  Click the link below for a youtube version of the book.

http://youtu.be/NY-vd99oMgM

Our pumpkin bread was ready to eat today, so we needed butter to spread on top of it.  We sat in a circle and  poured cream into a jelly jar.  Then we each took a turn shaking the jar as we passed it around the circle.  Two turns around the circle and it didn't sound like the cream was moving around as much so we opened the jar and it had turned into a thick whipped cream.  Then we passed it 

around two more times and opened it again.  This time the cream had seperated and butter had formed.  We spread it on our bread..delicious!! 

Jayme was our "Maple Leaf" this week and he brought in ice cream cones to help celebrate his special week as well as his birthday...yum!!  His mom and dad came to visit too.  Jayme's mom read us Jayme's  favorite story, Otis,  about a tractor.  Then Jayme's dad went out to his car and brought in some of Jayme's favorite things to do outside.  He brought in a leaf blower, a push lawn mower, a few other things and a tractor that we could ride as well as a riding lawn mower.  Jayme shared all his equipment with us and let each of us have a turn riding his vehicles too!  Boy was that fun!  Thanks Jayme and Jayme's family!!

We sent our Thanksgiving turkeys home that we each painted too.  We have great artists in our class!!

On Friday we heard the story Gregory, the Terrible Eater, about a goat who needed to learn to eat healthy foods.  Then we put on our movement CD and had fun "Bopping til we Dropped", and "Going on a Bear Hunt". The link below takes you to the cd we used.  Greg and Steve are two of the best for preschool music and movement activities.

http://www.amazon.com/Greg-Steve/e/B000APLXIS/ref=dp_byline_cont_music_1

During activity time we used our do-a-dots to make the letter K with Mrs. Chyko and worked on putting together a giant A,B,C floor puzzle with Mrs. Gould.  We also all worked on creating patterns on our peg boards.  We didn't get outside at all this week since the weather was sooo cold, we're hoping it warms up a little bit for us next week!