The Letter C

Wednesday was all about the letter C.

We practiced making letter C sounds and writing letter C's on our chalkboards.

We took turns finding objects that begin with the letter C.

We found a crown, a croc, a clothespin, a cub, some corn (as in popcorn), a cat, and some cereal.

We learned that letter C is sneaky and sometimes sounds like letter S.

And we helped each other find all of the letter C's that had been lost in a page of letters.

We made some popcorn using a noisy air popper and the kernels of corn that we found earlier... 

air popping was fun, but the popcorn was not very tasty until we added some salt!

Rectangles

Today was all about rectangles... those silly shapes that are like a square, but stretched out a little (or a lot). We practiced drawing rectangles, which have two long sides and two short sides.

A treasure hunt helped us identify rectangles in our environment,

and more importantly, led us to a snack...

...rectangle cheese and crackers.  There are many ways to eat them, 

Bryn's method was a triple decker which impressively stayed in tact until she had eaten the entire thing!

(Sorry, I think everyone had a red mustache from the punch at snack).

After snack, we created robots using paper rectangles in different sizes and colors.

 

 

 

Yay rectangles!!!

Y is for Yak

Keeping with the theme of Y and yarn, we made a rather hairy yak with our yarn. Some were hairier (is that a word) than others.  But they sure had a fun time.  The color of the week was yellow and so we spent some time talking about all things yellow.  We finished our day with a snack of yogurt and yellow bananas.  These kids are so much fun!!!! 

Y is for Yarn

Today in preschool we learned about the letter Y! We played with brightly colored strands of yarn. We made a fun web out of the yarn. The kids really loved making the web.  Who knew that some yarn and a challenge would be such a hit. It was a challenge to get them to do anything else.
I showed the kids a video on how yarn is made with a spinning wheel which truly fascinated them.  They were all anxious to sheer some animals in order to try making some of their own yarn on Bryn's spinning wheel. :)
All in all I think the concesus is they love yarn and are full of ideas of what to do with it.

Brushing Teeth

We finished our hygiene week talking about the importance of brushing our teeth. We pretended to have dinosaur teeth that needed to be cleaned. This dinosaur had been drinking too much soda pop!

(The egg on the left was soaked over night in soda pop and the other is a regular hard boiled egg.)

The kids worked together in pairs with toothpaste and toothbrushes to get those "dinosaur teeth" clean.

We learned it takes a lot of scrubbing to clean our teeth. Just a quick brush-over won't make our teeth sparkle.

Then we made happy mouths on paper plates. I had white squares for the kids to glue on for teeth but most preferred to draw their own square teeth.

Look at that HAPPY mouth!

Each one unique.

We sang a silly song - "This is the way we wash our face" with lots of silly actions.

And we finished with a game of Counting Teeth.

We took turns rolling the dice and then put that number of marshmallows on the tooth game board. 32 teeth sure seems like a lot!

Hygiene and Letter V

This week we learned a funny word - hygiene. (It was fun to say!)

We helped the Lamb Chop puppet get ready for a bath. The kids all knew Lamb Chop needed soap and not a shoe in the bathtub. There were lots of giggles and lots of hugs for the puppet.

Snack time was serious work. The kids practiced making the letter V with pretzels and cheese sticks. It was fun to make them big and little.


It was really fun to make the letter V disappear!

We used glitter to see what happens to germs on our hands. The boys started with glitter on their hands but after a few hand shakes everyone had glitter. Wiping our hands on our clothes didn't get all the glitter off. We learned that hands need to be washed many times during the day and it takes bubbles (soap) to get them really clean.

The kids traced their hands on white paper then cut them out.

We blew bubbles with straws and tried to color the paper hands with just the dyed bubbles.

It was hard not to put the paper all the way into the water and it was most fun to BLOW BUBBLES.

We also practiced writing the letter V on our chalkboards.

Snowflakes, snowflakes, and more snowflakes!

On Friday we spent most of the time painting our beautiful snowflakes. We covered one side, then let them dry while we read a Christmas story. We talked about the letter "X" and about xylophones and other words that have "x" in them. Then we went back to painting, turning our snowflakes over and working on the other side. Zane had taken his paint shirt off while we read our story and since everyone else had left theirs on, I forgot to remind him to put his back on until he had paint all over the front of his shirt! Sorry! Our snowflakes turned out great even though they were a bit more work than I thought they would be with the kids.

"Twas the Night Before Christmas"

On Wednesday we worked on our snowflakes again until we ran out of craft sticks (I should have counted out how many we were going to need!) Then we read Twas the Night Before Christmas. All the kids we're vying for the best position to see the pictures and were quite excited about Santa! Then we rolled out dough to make crackers (like Wheat Thins) and cut out Christmas shapes and had snacks in the last few minutes of school.

Christmas Music

This week our themes were Christmas and music. So we combined the two and sang some of the kids' favorite Christmas music (almost everyone's favorite was Jingle Bells). Our shape for the week was a hexagon, so after discussing what a hexagon is, we started working on our snowflake craft by making the hexagon base with craft sticks. The kids were very excited to work with their own bottles of glue and a few craft sticks got completely slathered in glue!

While the glue dried we learned how to play a lap harp and the kids each took a turn playing Jingle Bells on it. Everyone did a great job playing and I think they were all very pleased that they could play it and actually make it sound like Jingle Bells.