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
No comments:
Post a Comment