Final Two Weeks

It was great seeing everyone at the Spring Sing last Thursday.  We spent most of the week preparing for it!!  We were so proud of the kids...what a great job they did!!  And Thank You parents for all the delicious treats afterwards.  As teachers, our favorite part is watching the kids perform, but we know that the kids favorite part is being with their family and friends and eating the treats and running around in the narthex with their classmates after the show.  That's what they always talk about!!!

The past two days we have celebrated two birthdays!!  On Tuesday we celebrated Kate's 5 and 3/4 birthday!!  (Her real birthday is in August).  She sent in delicious frosted sugar cookies for a treat.  Yum, Kate!!  So glad we could all celebrate together!!

We heard a great story about a mother bear and a baby bear.  Mrs. Gould got the story when she was on a trip out west in the Grand Tetons.  The pictures in the book were real photos of bears out west.  We wanted to hear the book again we liked it so much, but if we did that we wouldn't have had time to go to the park so we decided we'd just have to hear the book again another day!

We walked to Wildwood Park on First Avenue and had a lot of fun playing on the equipment, running around and swinging!!  We were so tired and hot when we got back to school we all sat around the snack table and had Dixie cups filled with water.  While we were drinking we used pegs and pegboards to create designs, patterns, and shapes!

Today we celebrated Jonas's 5th birthday.  It is his real birthday today.  Happy Birthday, Jonas!!  He brought in dirt cups with worms for a snack!!  (pudding, oreo cookies and gummie worms).  Since we had been studying worms the past few weeks it was fun to eat some!! Thanks for sending in the great treat!!

During quiet activity time, first thing in the morning, Carter kept very busy working on his peg design that he started yesterday.  He was so proud of his accomplishment when he was done that we had to take a picture!!

Great job, Carter!!

We heard a story today called The Perfect Pet. It was about a girl who really wanted a pet but her parents didn't want one.  So she looked and looked and thought and thought until she finally found the perfect pet!  She named him Doug.  Ask your child what kind of pet Doug was.  Below is the link to the book read on youtube.  

http://youtu.be/qGoTeV2RjDU

The kids giggled all the way through this book!!  Then we went outside to play.  We had bug nets and magnifying glasses outside in case anyone wanted to look for bugs.  Most of the kids wanted to do that for part of the time we were outside.

 Back inside, it was activity time!! The kids had been asking for it, it's usually their favorite time of the day.  We had play dough set out, the sand table open, a lady bug art project available, 

cars and car ramps and we even got out a school bus play house that the kids could get inside!  It was a great final day of preschool.  Thanks for such a terrific year, we couldn't have asked for a better group of kids and parents!  Have a wonderful summer break and look forward to seeing many of you back next year! 

Flowers

We started the week celebrating charlie's birthday!  He brought in some yummy train cookies for snack.  He said he helped his mommy decorate them.  Happy 4th birthday, Charlie, and thanks for the delicious treat!!

We were learning about flowers this week.  We walked around the neighborhood on a flower hunt.  We found daffodils, tulips, pink and purple hyacinths, lillys, grape hyacinths and crocus!!  Most of the kids decided that their most favorite flower of all is the dandelion!!!  Because they can pick those!!

We liked to smell the flowers if we were able to get close enough.  We found out if you get too close you may end up with pollen on your nose or lip!!

We were scientists when we went inside and looked at some potted daffodils that were done blooming.  We pulled them out and found a bulb on the bottom of the stem!!  Then we saw roots underneath that.  We also looked at some other plants and identified their parts.

We learned about the letter Y.  The color yellow starts with the letter Y.  Lots of flowers are yellow!!  Mrs. Chyko helped us make y's with do-a-dots.

Another day we planted seeds.  We planted sunflower seeds and snapdragon seeds. We covered the with dirt, added water and put them in the sunny window to grow.  It will be fun to watch them grow over the next few weeks.

We also heard some great stories about families and mommies this week.  We had a lot of fun making a special project for our moms.  Happy Mother's Day!!

Spring!!

It was raining as I walked into school this morning.  Puddles and worms were everywhere.  We were planning to study spring today and what could be more "springy" in Wisconsin then rain, puddles and worms.  So later in the morning, when it was just misting a little bit outside the kids partnered up and each twosome was handed a magnifying glass so we could go outside on a worm hunt!!

We love learning about the natural sciences and had more fun looking for worms!!

We learned that worms like to live underground in the dark so we picked up a lot of the worms and put them back in the grass and the dirt so they could go home.

We also learned that worms make holes in the ground, are good for the soil and help things grow!!   We watched a short video about worms and composting. 

► 5:19► 5:19

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X69M1MBGG8A

Jun 1, 2011 - Uploaded by scottndisa

Mrs. Rice shows kids how to create a worm habitat out of a plastic tub. ... Worm Farm ...

We're playing a memory game and are working on memorizing our phone numbers so each day we've been practicing reading them out loud during circle time. Then we turn our card, with our phone number on it, over and see how many of the numbers we remember!! Even Mrs. Gould is trying to memorize her husbands new cell phone number!!  So far one of us has completely memorized a phone number, (it isn't Mrs. Gould!!)  the rest of us

are getting close.  Keep practicing at home, we'll do this daily until the end of  the year and see how many of us can memorize all the numbers in our phone number!  We've also been practcing dialing them on a play phone in our kitchen center.  

We've been working on counting and....

patterns with our unifix cubes.

We also made a terrarium this week and talked a little about the water cycle, and what plants need to live.  

Then we used charcoal, river rocks, soil, and sheet moss to create a class terrarium.  We all worked together to put everything we needed inside our glass container.

We added 3 plants to complete our botany project!!

We saw that the water was trapped in our terrarium the next day because the lid was wet inside!!

Of course we've been having a lot of fun playing outside as the weather has been getting nicer.  We've been using balls, sidewalk chalk and our climbing equipment!

Thursday Mrs. Bulgerin subbed for Mrs. Chyko.  It was fun to have her back for a visit!!

Mika brought in some special treats from Holland for our snack on Thursday.  Her Oma and Opa brought them from the Netherlands on their visit.  We loved them!!  Thanks Mika, Oma and Opa for the delicious (and international!!) treat!!