Valentine's Week!

We took a little break from our animal theme and focused on Valentine's, the color pink, and reviewing our letters.

 Playing a matching game on our class whiteboard.  We matched capital and lowercase letters and reviewed their sounds.  These kids are getting their letters down and getting ready to read!

Miss Emily led the children in a music and movement game to review letters as well!

 Before we started our color pink lesson, I had the kids guess which 2 colors we would mix together in order to make pink.  They came up with some pretty interesting color combinations! 

 They loved helping to mix red and white together to magically make...

the color PINK!

 Since we were learning about pink, we had fun reading "Pinkalicious and the Pink Drink."

For one of our projects this week, we made little Valentine's books!  Their favorite part was the "secret pockets" for their love notes!

They turned out quite LOVELY!

 The children really enjoyed decorating their own Valentine to give to someone they love.

I love how diligent this little guy was as he wrote his thoughtful love-note to his mom! 

 This was a fantastic activity to encourage more practice with writing letters and words.  They did a terrific job!

 Thanks to one of our wonderful mothers for making a fun Valentine Shape Twister!  The kids had a blast playing together during our Valentine's day party!

 A big thanks to another amazing mom for providing the Valentine's party treats!

  This was the most anticipated part of the Valentine's day party! They were thrilled to pass out the Valentine's they brought for all of their friends!

 Valentine memory match!  Learning through playing games is very effective.  "Memory" is a brilliantly fun way to encourage children to pay close attention to detail and remember where each card is. 

We had a great week preparing for and celebrating Valentine's day!  These kids are so loving, thoughtful, and kind!  I love them very much!  And I know my assistant teachers feel the very same way!  Thanks for letting us love them!

Another lively music and movement game where the children acted out a specific animal and led their class in that action! 

 I love this joyful grin!

 Caring for a cute little kitty!

 Pairing items that go together!

Celebrating another birthday together!

Next week we will continue learning about animals as we focus our week on REPTILES and the letter R!

 

Animals are fascinating to play with and learn about!!

Fish Week!

During the month of February, we will be learning about different classifications of animals.  This first week we learned about FISH!

We learned all sorts of interesting things about fish!  And then we organized what we had learned in a bubble map.

 We read "The Rainbow Fish" by Marcus Pfister together as a class and discussed how we can be happy by being a nice friend and sharing with others.  The kids absolutely loved this book! 

 Then, each child got to paint their own fish either from the story or from their own imagination.  I loved seeing the colors they mixed and the detail with which many of them painted.

We hung up our "school" of fish in our classroom after each fish got a sparkling scale just like in "The Rainbow Fish"!

 All of the kids thoroughly enjoyed our fishing games we played this week!  This game helped them patiently take turns fishing so their lines didn't get hooked together. 

They also worked on their eye-hand-coordination! 

 This fishing game was great for practicing colors and numbers as well as practicing sharing and
taking turns!

 With this class, we used our puppets to learn which animals in the ocean are fish and which are not.

 Then, they got to "swim" around with their fish and other ocean animals!

This week we also learned about most and least and how to show those in a graph. 

We used colored goldfish crackers to make a graph and then the Pre-K students colored in their graph as they ate the crackers!  They really did a fantastic job of figuring out which color had the most and which had the least on their own graph.

The 3-year-olds also had graphs, but they worked on matching colors to fill in their individual graph.

We just focused on the idea of most with the 3-year-olds.  

Be sure to point out to your preschoolers whenever you see an opportunity to reinforce

 the concept of most around the house, at the store, or wherever you are together!

"D" was our letter this week!  There are a lot of fun things that start with "D"!

Making our "Itsy Bitsy Letter D Books"!  These kids are getting quite good at cutting!  We also practiced writing the letter and colored some "D" things in our miniature book.

We love celebrating birthdays in our class!  Happy birthday!

The children really look forward to making a special card when it's someone's birthday.  It is a meaningful way to get some name-writing practice in!

I love the image of these children being doctors, nurses, and patients.  Centers is a perfect time for the kids to interact with one another and be creative as they role play.

This cute little girl worked so diligently on finding all the letters in order and was so proud when she made it all the way to "z"!

Our 3-year-olds are getting really good at counting!  Each day we count our fingers two different ways to help reinforce the correct order of counting as well as one-to-one correspondence.

We had a lot of fun and learned some very interesting things this week!  Next week we will be taking a little break from our animals theme and jump wholeheartedly into Valentine's! 

Open enrollment for next school year and summer preschool will begin this week!  Be sure to tell your friends as well!

Staying Healthy!

We finished up learning about our bodies during the last week of January by learning how to keep our bodies healthy!

As part of eating healthy, we learned about the 5 food groups!  

We learned that we get important vitamins and nutrients from the healthy food we eat!  We also learned that we should eat lots of different kinds of food.  

 

We made our own food groups plate to take home.  This website: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/kids/ has some fun games and activities to go along with the food groups and a balanced diet if you want to explore it with your child.

 They did a great job and were quite proud of the balanced meals they created on their plates!

 The kids had fun playing our healthy habits game!  

Whenever I said a habit that would help keep our bodies healthy, the kids flexed their strong muscles!  Then, when I would say a habit that wouldn't help us to be healthy, the kids would sit down.

 We learned that exercise is another important way to keep our bodies healthy!

 Somersaults are a great way to move our bodies!

 As a review of how to keep our bodies healthy, the kids drew pictures of their favorite healthy food as well as a good way to exercise!

 This was the first project where we've had the 3-year-olds attempt drawing something specific.

 After modeling how to draw a few different things, we let them go for it!  We were quite pleased to see their attempts and some of their wonderful pictures!

 Enjoying a book one of the children chose to have Ms. Ann read at the end of class!

 I love the proud look on this sweet little girl's face as she was showing me the letter puzzle she did all by herself!  Learning letters and sounds is so rewarding!

  Enjoying play-doh during centers this week!

  We learned the letter "U" this week.  The kids LOVED when we sang our letter of the week song.  We jumped u-u-up when we sang the "u" sound!

  For our letter day, we focused on umbrellas.  We discussed how different umbrellas look and noticed that some have patterns, some have designs, and some are all one color. 

The children enjoyed designing their own unique umbrella and then finding words that had a "u" in them.  They thought it was pretty neat to find the words and letters and cut them out of old magazines!

  

Cute kids and their umbrellas!