Nests, Nests, Nests!

Learning about birds last week was the perfect springboard into this week's theme: NESTS!

 

 

Checking out a real robin's nest!  We observed that it was made of mud, grass, twigs, and pine needles.

 I love that one student brought in this mud swallow nest.  It was neat to see how this nest was made quite differently than the robin's nest. 

 We read books about different types of nests,

and even got to watch an eagle sitting on it's eggs in it's huge nest! 

 Here's the link to keep watching the eagle and it's eaglets: http://hdontap.com/index.php/video/stream/bald-eagle-live-cam

 To strengthen fine motor skills, the children made their own nests out of Play-doh too!  It was interesting to see how the kids chose to make their eggs and how many they put in their individual nests!

 It was fascinating to watch a busy hummingbird build it's nest one piece of fluff or stick or feather at a time!

   The kids pretended to be birds and "gathered" their nest-building materials one at a time in a little relay game!

I love how these realistic nests turned out!

 To top off our nest week, we enjoyed eating nests for snack!!

We got to learn about chickens, pretend to feed the chickens, and play like baby chicks when Suzy Safari came! 

Our letter of the week was "N"!  The kids loved seeing the pictures of themselves after they made these letters with their bodies!

Our big Pre-K kids practiced writing their names for N week.  We will continue practicing these on a regular basis to help them get ready for Kindergarten!  Lovingly encourage your kids to write their names with the first letter capitalized and the other letters lowercase. 

Playing a dice game to practice one-to-one correspondence and recognizing numerals during centers.

Ms. Ann and I were SO proud of this little smartie!  He is well on his way to Kindergarten!  Thanks for showing us how much you're learning!

Enjoying a delightful story with Miss Emily!

Ms. Ann did some great music times with the kids this week!  The kids were enchanted with exploring instruments and playing musical chairs! 

We had a terrific week and are looking forward to our Easter week coming up!

St. Patrick's Day and Birds!!

 We had a pretty lucky St. Patrick's day at our preschool!

We found a pot of gold left by a leprechaun!!

 Then we learned about St. Patrick and Ireland!

The kids really enjoyed mixing blue and yellow to make GREEN!!

Carefully painting inside the lines of their clovers!  They did a great job!

The leprechaun even left us green milk for our snack as well as a few green treats!!

***

After St. Patrick's day, we learned about birds! 

We all loved looking at different bird feathers, feeling what different feather feels like, and seeing which birds they came from!

Perusing various bird books and stories!  They really were fascinated by these!

I love the creativity of this cute student to make her birds colorful!

Working hard on our bird mobiles!

They were a lot of work, but definitely worth it!  These bird mobiles turned out great!  The kids loved getting to take these home to hang up!

We used our whole bodies to review some of the letters we've learned!  These kids are learning so much and really getting ready for Kindergarten!! : )

Egg Week!

This week was so neat as we learned all about eggs 

as well as identifying which animals hatch from eggs (oviparous animals).

 

We went on an egg-hunt around our preschool for animal eggs!

 

After our hunt, we gathered in small groups, opened the eggs to see which animals were inside and recorded our data.   The 3-year-olds graphed how many animals we found and the Pre-K students tallied and practiced writing numerals. 

Eggs are a perfect topic to study sequencing.  As we learned "Humpty Dumpty," we focused on which parts of the rhyme came first, second, third, and last.

 

 The kids enjoyed figuring out these sequencing puzzles as one of our centers this week.

This focus on sequencing helped us put the process of an egg's development and hatching in order.

 

A big thank you to a wonderful local bird farmer, Scott Humble, who generously gave us many different bird eggs so the preschoolers could  see first-hand how eggs can vary in size, shape, and color.

   "E" is for Eggs!

 I spy with my little eye: "E" and "e". 

 This was a great project to focus on not only the letter "E" but also the other letters we've been learning all year as the kids "hid" the E's amongst other letters.  It was fun to see how excited the Pre-K students were to show their parents their I Spy page to see if they would be able to find the E's!

These EGGStraordinary children are learning so much in so many areas of their development: socially, academically, emotionally, and physically.  I love seeing their eggcellent progress!

Next week we'll be flying high as we learn about birds!