Apples Week

Apples Week!

 

 Here's some of our morning "free play" centers....

 

We spent a lot of time working on fine motor skills this week and LOVED using tweezers.  We used our tweezers and red "apple" pom poms to create a capital and lowercase letter Aa.  We also used these pom poms and tweezers to count out apples 1-10 on number cards!

 

We focused a lot on matching and patterning.  In this photo we used REAL apples to match with.

 



On Monday we worked on the parts of an apple.  We focused on four main parts: the leaf, core, seeds, and apple/flesh.  Those little "seeds" are little letter Aa's!  How cute :)  Awhile ago I bought a hole punch set at Michael's which has every letter hole punch in it and they come in handy!!

 



One of our FUN sensory tubs!  We washed apples in the water table.  We had both real and fake apples, cups and leaf shaped gems that I bought in clearance at Michaels.  The gems were just for pretty but we realized that when wet, the gems stick to the apples and the apples fit in the cups and look like ice cream!...yum :)  We also used this sensory tub to hypothesize if apples sink or float...guess what?  APPLES SINK!  They were wayyy too heavy but our fake apples floated so the tub was still a lot of fun :)

 



 

This was our fun and messy sensory tub!  We had rice everywhere but had so much fun trying to scoop up the pinecones, pumpkins, apples and leaves.  I SCENTED the rice with LOTS of cinnamon so it smelled heavenly!!  Can you tell sensory tubs are my favorite things?...I could run my fingers through the rice all day :)

 

 

 Yes we even made APPLESAUCE!!!!  We cored and cut 24 apples and added water, sugar, cinnamon and a little bit of lemon juice.  We made it in the morning and it was ready for lunchtime and it was soooooo good!!!!

 

Here's a photo of the start of our project...

 

 

Inside the crock pot...

 



 

 It's all done and mashed...we left some chunks in it and added extra cinnamon.

 

Our Applesauce Recipe

Makes 4 servings

(we timed it by 6 to have enough for the kids with a lot extra)

 

4 apples peeled and cored

3/4 cups water

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup sugar

tiny bit of lemon juice (optional)

 



 

We learned about Johnny Appleseed this week.  We learned that his real name was Johnny Chapman!  We made a Johnny Appleseed craft (very easy) and dictated one fact we knew about apples.

 



 

 

We also read the book 10 Apples Up on Top and put apples in order from 1-10.  We added our own faces to the bottom, so it looked like we had 10 apples on our heads, just like in the story!

 

 

We had our hands painted to look like apples with worms for our thumbs!!  So cute!

 

 Our apple pie scented play dough and fun cookie cutters. 

 Their favorite activity was to cut the play dough in to tiny pieces! 

 It smelled so good...I added cinnamon extract and real cinnamon to the play dough!

 

 

 

Miss Vanessa did some fun crafts in the afternoon with our friends.  We focused a lot on the letter Aa for apple.  She had us create a letter A is for apple craft, which was so cute, even though some were backwards a's!

 

 

She also helped us make candy apples with REAL sprinkles.  We even tried caramel with our apples on Friday!  It was so yummy, we even licked our fingers!

 

 

Another fun craft activity was making apple pies.  We worked on straight up and down and side to side lines and weaving.  We cut the excess pieces off and used our fingers to fingerpaint apples!

 

 

We also cut apart an apple on the lines and glued it back together.  

We kept these cutting samples for our portfolios...

 

 

We also colored a letter Aa apple by number 1-4.

 

 

 Apples is always my favorite week and we had so much fun learning all about apples! 

 

Next week is health and safety...

 

Don't forget Wednesday and Thursday are PICTURE DAYS!

 

:) Danielle



Family and Friends Week

 

We had a very fun week!  We had excellent behavior, lots of giggles and ended the week with a mini pillow fight at "quiet" time...!  This week was family and friends week.  We talked about our parents and grandparents, pets, babies and siblings and friends.  We had a neat set up for dramatic play but I forgot to take a lot of pictures this week...the kids took care of babies!  We had a boppy pillow, lots of baby dolls, diapers, blankets, baby toys, etc.  We also used our dollhouse a lot this week!

 

Miss Amy finished our alphabet assessments and Miss Danielle finished assessing colors, shapes and writing our names. We continued to practice identifying our names visually and matching our picture to our names.

 

We talked a lot in the later part of the week on how we can be a good friend.  On one of the days the kids drew a picture of their best friend and had to tell us who their friend is and why they like him/her.  I love their little drawings!

 

 

 

Our circle of friends...

 



 

This was one of my favorite projects of the week...it's a "who lives in your house" glyph!  I'm not sure where I got the idea for this but I used one of my new favorite fonts.  I made a chart which you can see below...

 

 

They had to think about who lives in their house and glue down the correct colored squares.  This was a really neat activity because they really had to listen and follow directions to complete this activity!

 

We then counted and graphed the results below...

 



 

Our results...

 



 

14 Students have a mother in their home

15 students have a father in their home

7 students have a brother in their home

5 students have a sister in their home

11 students have at least one pet in their home

2 students have a grandparent in their home

 

We thought it was neat how different our families are!

 

We also made these silly puppies on pets day!  We folded paper by listening to specific directions, added a face, tongue and had to tell what we knew about our dogs and wrote them on the bones.

 

 

Close up of the dog's face...

 

 

Also on pets day we used our pattern blocks to make different pets.  We colored by number a puppy and rolled play dough to "feed" our pets.  We had a fun sensory tub with mini dog bones and dalmatians.  We also a rice sensory tub with plastic colored pacifiers and color cards to match!

 

We also matched mom and baby animal pictures in our math center and complete a baby to mom tracing worksheet and a beginning sounds worksheet as well!

 

We also worked on our bulletin board this week!  Did you know there is an owl in the tree?...or at least the kids have themselves convinced there is...!  Oh well, the imagination of 3 and 4 year olds!

 

 

Here was Brody's answer to who he is "nuts" about...!  They had some cute answers from being "nuts" about cake, Star wars, whales, their teachers, etc.  They look cute on our tree.  We are getting ready for fall!!! :) 

 

 

SneaK preview!...This is our apple orchard dramatic play.  I thought I'd take a good picture of it before I forget or it gets destroyed!  I'm so excited for apples week and check back next week for more details and pictures of our fun activities...even our sensory tub is cinnamon scented!!!

 

 

Have a great weekend and Enjoy it with friends and family! 

Cross your fingers for no storms tomorrow!!!

 

Please check out our SpringRose website at www.springrosechildcare.com and click on the parents link.  Sign up or login to see our class' webpage and important documents and forms!!!!

 

:) Danielle



Back to School and Gotta Be Me Weeks!

This post is an overview of the last two exciting weeks in our classroom!  We were lucky enough to recieve an award for the Best New Arrangement and Room Set Up from Miss Jen and Miss Jocelyn!  Miss Vanessa and I were very excited about our award because a lot of work went into our super cute Monkey themed classroom and the kids have a lot of fun while their at school!

 

We started our back to school week by reviewing Mat Man.  Mat Man is a tool to teach the kids about body awareness in their drawings.  You wouldn't believe how many of their people drawings don't have bodies!  We had them draw a self portrait, listened to the mat man song and than drew another self portrait.  The changes were amazing!...body parts that were missings were suddenly found!!

 

 

In the Mat Man song, it talks about Mat Man having one body that has a heart, lungs and stomach!  This little girl added a heart and attempted to draw lungs!...(it's very hard to explain to a 4 year old what lungs EXACTLY look like).

 

 

Here is another Mat Man that we worked on.  We cut out the pieces to build mat man and the kids had to put the pieces together and draw his face.

 

 

A big skill that we are working on each day is name recognition and spelling.  We identify our names many times throughout the day and also spell them with letter tiles, velcro letters, magnetic letters, expo tracing, etc.  This time we worked on spelling our names with small construction paper circles.  We loved how colorful they turned out!

 

 

We spelled our names using letter tiles!! :)

 

 

 

Our School Buses!  I especially LOVE the upside down school bus!...I got this idea from Deanna Jump's Class.  You can visit her blog at http://mrsjumpsclass.blogspot.com/.  This was not only a super cute art project but was also a way to learn our names and phonemic awareness...

 

 

The writing says, "The Wheels on Charlotte's bus go cumpity cump all through the town".  The kiddos had to write the first letter of their name in the blanks to make the "bus move".  We had fun ones like bumpity bump and jumpity jump!  The faces in the window were also super fun!

 

 

Our fun sensory bins.  This one is hard to see but it is our human body sensory tub from our Gotta Be Me! Week.  I found this idea at http://countingcoconuts.blogspot.com/2012/07/sensory-tub-human-body.html They had a lot more "stuff" in it but I wanted to keep it simple!  The EYEBALLS were the favorite part...oh and did I mention, they bounce (oops!) :)

 

 

Our fun rice table!  Our colored rice has letter beads and our names written on little slips of paper.  We had so much fun trying to find our names!

 

 

Our birthday cake sensory tub!!  This one didn't last long because it was made of sprinkles and they got really dusty, but I added lots of candles and the kids liked sticking the candles into the containers...what a great fine motor activity I never even planned!!!

 

 

I am a member of a website called www.kidssoup.com and it has some really neat printables!  You have to have a membership but I like the activities, especially the fine motor worksheets.  This was a follow the directions and trace body worksheet.

 

 

Yes we played with q-tips!!!! and no, we didn't clean our ears with them!  We made cute q-tip skeletons.  We traced our hands and arm and glued them down where our bones would be!  The kids like squeezing their own fingers to feel their bones!

 

 

 

This week we wer focusing on the letter Ll.  I found a cool website that has letter mazes.  The kids used a dot marker to paint a dot on each capital and lowercase letter Ll that they could find.  They did such a great job!

 

 

 

Our doctor set up!  There are doctor tools in the basket, doctor words on the back of the cubbies and even a "prescription pad" with pencils for the kids to practice writing.  I forgot to take a picture of the other half of dress up but there were two blue cots that we used as the doctor's bed and our big bears for the kids to take care of!

 

 

I discovered large buttons in our break room!  I thought it would be fun for the kids to lace them with pipe cleaners and they did!!  We did this activity many times during the week because they liked them so much :)

 

 

Our letter Ll wall!

 

 

We discussed our feelings and read the story Glad Monster Sad Monster and made Glad Monsters from the story.  They are pretty silly!  The kids also had to tell us why they were glad.  We got cute answers from "My mom hugs me" or "when I play with Justin Bieber"...lol!

 

 

 

 

We were SCIENTISTS this week!!

 

We traced our hands and stamped our fingerprints.  We then compared them to posters of different types of fingerprints and used magnifying glasses to look at them!

 

 

 

We also worked on textures: soft, smooth, rough, hard and bumpy.  We glued on different things to respresent the textures such as a cotton ball, wax paper, sand paper, noodle and two cheeri-os!

 

 

 

On our sense of sight day we counted MONSTER EYE BALLS!  I wrote the number in and they kids had to recognize the number and count that many eyeballs to add to the monster. 

 

 

We worked on our birthdays as well!  We talked about how old we are and watercolored our birthday cakes.  We added candles to represent how old we are.

 

 

 

Mr. Potato head also uses his senses!  We learned that he uses his ears to hear, nose to smell, eyes to see, hands to touch and mouth to taste!  We made Mr. Potato heads in art and they looked so silly!!!

 

 

What a fun week we had!  We did lots more activities that I didn't take photos of, but we are proud of how much our kiddos are learning so quickly in to the school year!

 

Have a great weekend!

:) Danielle