This week was our first official week back to school and we had a fantastic week!!! We welcomed Miss Cindy back for the school year, as well as welcoming new friends to SpringRose, Emily and Delaney. We also welcomed new friends from the toddler rooms, Addy, Lauren and Kendall!
We focused a lot on our classroom rules and following directions in our classroom this week such as raising our hands, using walking feet and listening ears, etc.! We are trying to set up a great classroom environment for the rest of the year... :)
We did a lot of fun activities this week and read a lot of fun books like David Goes to School, The Kissing Hand and If You Take A Mouse To School.
On If You Take A Mouse to School day, we painted our mice gray and talked about what we would give our mouse and what our mice would ask for!
We let them dry during the day and added their faces at afternoon centers!
They turned out super cute :) This little one said if you give her mouse an apple, he would ask for a cookie to go with it. We had lots of food answers...we must have lots of hungry mice :)
Our whole wall of mice!
On our mouse worksheet in math we focused on the skill of "different" on the front. The kids had to look at three pictures and figure out which was different, and than work on patterning on the back. They had to look at the line of cheese and figure out if the next cheese was going to have holes or not. They did a great job!
Here is another mouse activity! We are working on simple numbers 1-5 in math. We completed a 1-4 color by number mouse from the story! We also worked on other math activities like shape matching, rubber bands on our geoboards and matching numbers with milk caps.
I adopted our new hamster, Sarah! She is such a sweet pea and loves when we pet her belly. She loves carrots and corn and sleeps most of the day but the kids LOVE to watch her stretch and nibble on her food! She looks like a little mouse (but without the tail). I believe kids should be exposed to lots of different animals so they learn how to treat them and are not scared and they love her!
I also got a crab from the beach when I was on vacation this summer. He's not as exciting, because he doesn't like to move during the day, but they named him SuperCrab. You can see him sitting on the star water bowl in the middle of the picture! He usually buries himself in the sand in the corner of the cage.
We also still have our guinea pigs, Piggy and Brownie, who live in the back of our classroom in the science center and our beta fish, Blue who stays on the counter.
Here's another picture of our friends working on our patterning page. You can see this little girl drew a circle in the box to demonstrate that the flat cheese was next in the pattern and than she colored the mouse. We are working on A LOT of fine motor skills such as coloring, tracing, cutting, gluing, etc.
Here is our circle area! This our favorite area, because we learn as a group here. Our rocking chair makes it feel like home to us :) You can see the monkeys on the wall on the right of the picture...the kids take the monkeys from their cubby and place them on the barrels to show who is here for the day! We also have name cards on the bottom of the wall where the kiddos match their picture to their name. We are working very hard on name recognition. Our handwriting without tears alphabet hangs above! We have a blue pocket chart next to the rocking chair where we learn about yesterday, today and tomorrow. We focus on our patterning on our yellow calendar and also have our potato head with our potato head rules on the wall to the left and our fun pointers. We do lots of fun activities during circle and group activities on this carpet! :)
These are our name tags and we have the kids match their names to their pictures.
We mix them up so it's constantly a challenge but name recognition is a BIG focus for us!
No, David!! We read David Goes to School and talked about our class rules. We worked as a class to follow step by step directions and create our own versions of David. It's cute how you give the kiddos the same pieces and directions and their final outcomes look so different! Their rules were so cute too! Addy says no gum in school because in the story, David has a big mouthful of gum and the teacher says, "No Gum in School David!". Miss Cindy read us this book and inserted our names instead of David's name and the kids LOVED it!
This was our first day project. We created these pencils in art and either wrote our names by ourselves or traced them with a teacher's help. Our goal is to be able to write our names very soon and for our kiddos that can already write their names, we are going to be working on lowercase letters.
Our theme this year is Monkeys! We have lots of monkey items around the room and this was our welcome back to school monkey bulletin board! "Pre-K is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys". Miss Vanessa turned their cute little hands into monkeys and we linked them together to make our bulletin board fun!! :)
We are "swinging into good work"! We are proud of our first day of school drawings so we hung them up on our good work board!
Lastly, we have three sensory tubs each week. This is our blue sensory tub with beads, glitter, sequins and letters. We also had a cutting sensory tub and our fun beads and feathers tub. All of our tubs change each week, but we will have different items to cut in one of our tubs for awhile so our kiddos learn proper hand position and strengthen their fine motor skills!
Enjoy your Labor Day and Have a great day off!
:) Danielle
