Thanksgiving

We spent the last two weeks at preschool getting ready for Thanksgiving!  We learned about turkeys through watching videos, singing songs, reading books, reciting fingerplays, and making them with our hands!  We discussed how Thanksgiving is a time we celebrate all the things we love and one way we do that is to make special food and eat it with people we care about.  So...the best way for preschoolers to learn is through experiencing it...we did a lot of cooking and eating with our new friends....just like the pilgrims and native americans did!!  We also had lots of fun making Thanksgiving artwork!

We baked a pumpkin at school and used it to make pumpkin break.  

We painted our hands to make turkeys.  We wrote a class story about turkeys that we included at the bottom of our art work!

The kids helped mix and stir...we called it "friendship pumpkin break" because we all helped make it!

Our homemade pumpkin bread and butter.  the kids loved it so much we had it two days in a row for snack!!

Pumpkin bread tastes better with butter on it!  We made some using whipping cream and a jar.  We passed it around and shook very hard and eventually we had butter!

Our pumpkin bread before cooking...the kids loved putting in the chocolate chips!! 

We also had fun making cranberry sauce.  We loved watching and hearing the cranberries pop while they cooked!

We had fun corn painting.  We used indian corn, brushed different color paint on it and rolled it around...so much fun...messy too!

Our finished indian corn projects!

We always have fun using our classroom materials.  We loved making a giant floor puzzle and building towers with blocks.

Roman brought in snack...thanks Roman...yum!

Fall animals

This week we talked about animals getting ready for the colder weather.  We passed a ball around during circle time and each child told us something they knew about squirrels.  Some of the answers included, "Squirrels eat nuts.  They have furry tails.  I see them in my yard."  It might be fun to ask your child what they know about squirrels and see what they say! We watched several short videos on our class ipad about squirrels and learned that they collect nuts and berries to eat during the winter.  We  read The Very Busy Squirrel.  This is a pattern book so the kids quickly caught onto the pattern and helped me "read"it.  Learning patterns to stories and memorizing text is one of the first stages of reading...it's so exciting to see that all of the kids are doing this!!  We went outside and looked for squirrels while we were playing but didn't see any...but we all decided that we're going to keep looking!!   Other books we read this week included Ten Fat Turkeys and Bear Says Thanks. Something new we did was to hide cardboard turkeys around the room and the kids went on a turkey hunt to find them.  The catch was that they had to find the turkey that had the first letter of their name on it.  All of the kids did it!  They wanted to do this all week long!! Thursday was show and tell and we had lots of great things that started with T! 

Brooke brought in the snack this week.  Thanks Brooklyn!!

Our Wednesday group.  We went on a fall nature walk.  We saw several flocks of geese flying overhead in the "V" shape. We saw apples in an apple tree, we noticed a lot of pretty colors on the trees, we felt the wind on our faces and watched as it blew down a lot of the leaves.  Finn found seed pods in a tree and then we all found one on the ground to take home with us!  We looked for squirrels again, but still didn't find any.  Maybe the kids will see them at home!

At art center this week we turned the letter "t" into a turkey!

We added "airplane island" to our activity time.  The kids had fun building with blocks and flying airplanes!

Playing with the trucks is a favorite activity!

Our finished turkeys.  We have magnificent artists in our class!!