Happy Thanksgiving!

We just had one day of school to get ready for Thanksgiving so we enjoyed reading Thanksgiving stories and learning about the Pilgrims and Indians and the feast they had so long ago.  The kids also enjoyed preparing for their families' Thanksgiving feast by making their own Thanksgiving place mats!  They loved making their mats just how they wanted them.

 They turned out great!

 Here are a couple of cute pictures from centers too!

 After centers, we gather at the rug and work on numbers and ABCs.  These little 3-year-olds are practicing counting their fingers one-by-one. 

We hope you had a very happy Thanksgiving! 

Rain!

As part of our weather theme, we learned about rain and other types of precipitation like snow and hail!  For one of our projects, we made an umbrella with raindrops falling on it.  The children loved being able to create their own unique umbrella!

 

 

 

 We also learned "It's Raining, It's Pouring".  They all did a great job memorizing the words and doing the actions.  With the older kids, we gave them the opportunity to stand up in front of the class and recite it all by themselves if they wanted!  We were so impressed!

We learned the order of the colors in the rainbow and then the kids painted with water and saw how the colors on their rainbow magically blurred together like a real rainbow we see in the sky after it rains!

 

 Our letter this week was "U".  The older kids worked on their fine-motor skills as they carefully grabbed the pom-poms with chopsticks and sorted them onto the colored umbrellas.  This was a great time to add in some math as we pointed out which groups had more, less, and equal numbers.

It's always neat to see what the kids create and how they play together during centers. 

 All the kids really enjoy when the kitchen area is a center.  We had some great little cooks and bakers this week as well as some that turned the puppet stand into a market again!

 

 We also had some wonderful, active music and movement times!  The boys and girls get so excited when we pull out the scarves for them to dance with!

 These pictures are from the favorite pony song!  The kids LOVE when they get to pretend they're riding their pony around and then when the music slows and gets quieter, they ride their tired pony back to the stable for it to rest...just to anxiously wait for the music to start back up again!!

Clouds

As part of cloud week, we read different books about how clouds are always changing shape.  One of the books we read was "It Looked Like Spilt Milk."  Each page in this book has a white shape that looks like something familiar.  At the end of the book, the kids see that all the shapes were actually clouds in the sky! 

After reading this book, the kids got to paint their own white shape on half of a paper and then fold it in half, rub it, and open it up to see what their "cloud" image looked like.  We had everything from angels to Olaf to cookies!  This was a great creative science project!

We learned that clouds are always moving and changing shape.  We talked about how the wind moves the clouds and then we got to try it out!  This "cloud race" was a hit! 

We also enjoyed a visit from Mother Goose!  We always have a wonderful time with Mother Goose and Goosey!  We love when she sings, plays ring-around-the-rosies, and reads stories!

"R" was our letter for the week.  We worked on rhyming words with the older kids.  We played lots of different games with our rhyming cards!  Rhyming can be a tricky concept for some children.  Exposure to rhymes is important to help children be able to hear the rhyming words and catch on to how to make a rhyme.  Be sure to point out rhymes in stories, poems, and songs!

This is a great picture during centers.  I love seeing what children come up with as they play and explore!

Weather and Wind!

This week we learned the letter "T".  I loved when these kids spontaneously made their own "T's" during centers!

During November we are learning about weather!  We talked about sunny, cloudy, partly cloudy, windy, rainy, and snowy.  Here we were making a sun for sunny weather.

Then we made a weather chart that the kids could take home to share with their family what type of weather they observe each day.  This was a great project for the Pre-K kids to practice their cutting skills.  They did a great job!  All the students were very interested in learning about the weather.  Every time we went out to recess, we looked up at the sky and noticed what the weather was like.  They were so intrigued!  We will continue to notice how the weather changes as we transition into winter!

We talked about how the weather determines what we wear outside.  The children took turns picking an item out of our bag and deciding if we would wear it when it was hot, cold, or rainy outside. 

We also learned about the wind this week.  We learned that the wind is helpful in a lot of ways from spreading seeds to making sailboats move.  For our project we experimented with a variety of objects to see if we could make them move with the "wind" we could produce with our mouth.  The kids loved testing each item and were thrilled when they could make it move!  Then they drew pictures of their findings!

 I just had to add this picture!  It was so fun to watch as more than half of this class came to school dressed in stripes!  What a coincidence!

  Music time with instruments is always exciting!  These kids were learning the different names of the instruments and how to play them.  They did a great job taking turns playing each one!