Danver's Shining Stars: July Overview

Sorry I haven't gotten to post as much! We've had a busy summer so far...it's been full of exciting and wet water days and special events such as the fire safety day and a visit from the Lehigh Valley Zoo with a snake, turtle, sloth and even an owl!

I'm wrapping up a couple weeks of curriculum into one post so enjoy!!! I'm sorry if I miss some things, but I tried to take as many pictures are possible...

Here is a picture of our Pirate Sensory tub filled with treasure, coins and necklaces!! We have a lot of fun sensory tubs each week. We have this blue one which stays the same every day and two clear tubs that we change out during the week. We use a variety of different tools such as measuring cups, wooden spoons, bowls, big and little cups, whisks, spatulas, etc.

These sharks are from ocean week! We colored them blue, added lots of teeth and wrote what we would eat if we were sharks! We got pretty interesting answers. Our kiddos are so imaginative!! Miss Vanessa made sharks with us in the afternoon as well that had big teeth. Later in the week we learned about whale sharks that have white polka dots, so we used a technique where we drew circles with crayons and painted over them with watercolors. They turned out so cool. During ocean week we also listed our favorite animals, and the shark definitely was the favorite.

Here are our big pirate from last week's Island Adventure curriculum. Our pirates turned out really cute and the kids had fun adding their own touches such as the faces, stripes and bandana decorations. The pirate's shirt reflects their favorite color! Our favorite part was the peg leg!!!

Circle time is one of my favorite parts of the day because it brings all the kids together and it's really cute to hear them sing, greet each other and learn lots of new skills! We cover days of the week, months of the year, the weather, letter, shape and name identification, the date and pattern. We have a flag holder, pointer picker and a weather helper. We will soon add a line leader and caboose!

This is our new listening chart...We use Mr. Potato head! He starts...NAKED!...the kids love it. (they love saying naked! lol) They add the pieces and list the rules. Below are the rules that apply to each piece. If someone breaks a rule during the day, we refer back to Mr. Potato Head.

Here's our Monkeys in a barrel sensory tub.

It is simple but the kids LOVE this tub!

They especially love the sparkly beads!!!

Monkeys in a barrel are one of their favorite center activities!

During Island Adventure week we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and made our own coconut trees (without coconuts...oops!!!). We used the leaf cut outs to make a palm tree, wrote/traced our names and counted how many letters we have in our names. This is one of the many activities we are using right now to learn our names and the letters in them. We are doing great!!!

I know this is hard to see, but this is our Princess dress up. We have our fairy tale curtain, princess dress, prince shirt, goblets, tiaras, crowns and of course our dollhouse. Our dollhouse recently came back down from the attic and the kids are in L-O-V-E with it!! I also bought foam swords for medieval week but that will need to be closely supervised!

Here are our watercolor paper plate fish from ocean adventure week! They were super cute :)

The kiddos also LOVE having their hands painted! We made a parrot and added our colorful handprints as the wings. Their tails were the cutest part of the parrot.

Who doesn't the Little Mermaid? We read the story and made mermaids in art. We covered the mermaid with green tissue paper for the tail, added glitter and yarn hair! They even made the mermaids to look like they were swimming! Some of the beautiful mermaids even had pretty earrings and necklaces. :)

This is our safe place...we use it when kids are upset or just need

a place to sit to cool down or relax away from the group.

These were our math number octopii. We counted out 8 legs, glued them on the

back and practiced writing numbers 1-8 on the bottom of the legs. This is something we will be working on during our school year.

We used our knights to protect our wooden castles!

We dyed our water table blue to look like the ocean and sailed our boats...(it's more fun to put our hands in and see if they turn blue). This has been a fun activity this week!