US History Week

This week was US History and Landmarks!

 

We celebrate President's Day!!  We learned about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and President Obama!  We sorted and cleaned pennies in the water table!  We sorted and counted money in our science center (which was so exciting).  We even did penny rubbings.  We drew our own depictions of the American Flag and finger painted the Flag (which you will see a photo of later).

 

We ordered pennies on a number line from 1-22 and even practiced counting in Spanish!

 

One of my favorite activities...

 

I took a photo of their profile and cut it out on black paper.  They cut out the circle, glued on their photo and wrote their name!  So cute!

 

 

 

Here you can see a side by side comparison....

 



 

Here was us cleaning pennies in the sensory tub.  Miss Danielle added so much soap, you couldn't even see the pennies!  We used this tub for 4 days and it never got old!  Kids LOVE bubbles!

 

 

This was one of our left over Valentine projects!  We used water colors to paint in our salad spinners.  This was such a neat activity because we would add one color, spin it and look at it.  Then we would add another color and so on until all 5 colors were added.  The kids LOVED looking at it in between each color.

 

 

  Another salad spinner project

We even finger painted!

 

 These were our Abraham Lincolns.  Can you see the beards?  They also had to tell us what they would hide under their top hats...a lot of students would hide a bunny!

 

 

 

Introducing Flat Stanley!  If you have never read the book Flat Stanley please do so!  Anyway...Stanley gets flattened by a bulletin board and his family mails him to California to visit his friend.  He also helps catch a bank robber and flies like a kite.  We colored our own Flat Stanleys and hopefully some of our families will mail him to their families too!  We'd like to create a map of all the places our Flat Stanley's have visited!  Miss Vanessa is taking hers to Disney and Miss Danielle also mailed hers to a family member in Florida and a friend in Australia!!!

 

 

 

 

On Cherry Pie Day (yes we ate Cherry Pie...yum!), we used our red "cherry" pom poms to spell out the letter Mm.

 

 

We also cut M's out of map and glued it on our paper!  It was a very good fine motor skill to cut straight and diagonal lines.

 

 

I wish I would have taken in progress photos of this project but it was very involved!  We blew through straws to spread out our brown watercolor paint and tried to make trees.  Some of our friends needed some help but they turned out cute!...

 

 

After they dried we used q-tips to paint cherries on them! 

 

 

 

 

Valentine's Week

We started our week by learning about the Chinese New Year!

 

We explored different noodles and chopsticks in the sensory bin and practiced picking up our noodles as our fine motor center. 

 

 

One of our science centers this week was learning about magnets.  We used different types of magnets to pick up paper clips.  The students explored and counted how many paper clips their magnet could hold!

 



 

Our Chinese New Year Craft was a handprint dragon who got very messy!  They turned out really cute :)  I love their chubby little fingers.  We learned that 2013 is the Year of the Snake but we don't really like snakes so the students picked their own animal to represent 2013.  Our answers ranged from Year of the cheetah to butterfly to dog!

 

 

The rest of the week was devoted to Valentine's Day.  I didn't take a lot of photos this week because we were super busy making our parent valentines and enjoying our parties at the end of the week.

 

This was a math/fine motor center entitled "You Rule" (get it?)...lol!  They had to make straight lines with a ruler.

 

 

One of our science experiments was color changing Gobstoppers!  We colored in a worksheet with the first color that our Gobstopper started out as, we then placed it in water and watched it change to another color!  The kids could hardly wait but really enjoyed this activity!!!

 

 

Who doesn't love to play in candy hearts?!  We had a lot of candy heart centers this week!  We sorted them by color, stacked them up and counted how high our towers were, measured them and explored them in science.  (We even ate a couple)!

 

 

Miss Danielle even ground up some candy hearts and mixed it with shaving cream and we got to paint with it! It smelled so good but was REALLY messy when it dried!

 

 

We worked on the letter Vv for Valentine.  We had to color in the letter Vv's with a pink crayon.  On the back, we had to color in the hearts as well :)

 

 Stacking candy hearts and sorting them by color...

 

 

We were super busy this week but our favorite activity by far was passing out of Valentine's to all our friends!  We did other fun activities such as making a tin foil hershey kiss in art and a tree of hearts out of magazine hearts.  We drew someone we loved in our journals and poked the letter Vv with our push pins!  We even had a real post office in our dramatic play area with letters, envelopes, crayons and a mail box to deliver our mail!

 

In Science we explored rose petals and drew pictures of real roses!  We excavated hearts in blocks of ice in the water table...it was really cold!  We played in the water table with pink water and smelled our Scentsy scents.  We also looked through our valentine kaleidoscopes! 

 

We enjoyed Valentine's Day!  Thanks to all our parents who donated food to our parties! 

 

:) Danielle

Dental Health Week

Dental Health Week!

Our blog is back and in action!

 

I had a great 6 week maternity leave and gave myself 2 weeks to get back into our classroom routine before I really started planning and taking photos!

 

We had a great week learning about our teeth this week! 

 

We implemented a science "block" during the day where we do science centers.  You can check out the photos on our back wall.  This week we examined our teeth in mirrors, painted with dental floss, played in a variety of different sensory tubs, brushed teeth with toothpaste and even played in shaving cream.

 

We worked on the letter T for Tooth fairy and tooth and the letter D for dentist!  We used our fine motor skills to fill the circles with pom poms.  They loved this activity so much that we did it over and over!

 

 

 

Our letter of the week was Aa so we made A for alligator.  We glued on our capital A, added teeth and eyes to create our fun alligators!

 

 

Our tooth fairies were our favorite craft this week.  We put together the pieces anyway we wanted and than watercolored the bodies and wings.  This photo below is in process (hence no face).  The photo below shows the completed project.  They also had to answer what they wanted the tooth fairy to put under their pillow.  We had some creative answers from money to cookies to a real dog!

 

 

 

In science we dyed carnations with colored water!  Kendall's mom donated us white carnations (from Petals on Penn) and we watched them change color during the week!  The kids loved this activity and would yell from across the room for Vanessa and me to look at the flowers!

 

 

This photo was from Monday...they were a lot darker by Friday.

 

 

We also had another fun experiment the kids loved and went home to their parents talking about their eggs.  Sunday night, I hardboiled 24 eggs and brought them into school on Monday.  On Monday we talked about how some foods and drinks are harmful to your teeth if used in excess and we also discussed what happens if you don't brush your teeth every day.  We had the students pick between coke, dr. pepper, root bear, cranberry juice and coffee to fill their cups with.  We let the eggs sit all day and cleaned them on Friday.  Check below in the blog to see photos of us cleaning our eggs!

 

 

Another science center was to brush our laminated teeth models with shaving cream! 

 

 

We matched and ordered numbers from 1-20 on our alligator teeth number line.

 

 

In art we painted with toothbrushes with red, orange, green and purple paint

(which exploded all over me!)

 

 

We had a cookie sensory tub with oatmeal, laminated number cookies and tongs.

 

 

More toothbrush paintings...

 

 

This was MY favorite project of the week!  It was messy and the play dough stuck to the table but it was so neat.  We rolled out playdough "snakes" and made our mouth with it.  The play dough was so sticky that it stuck itself right to the paper!  We then talked about how many teeth we have and learned that kids have 20 baby teeth, 10 on top and 10 on the bottom.  We added 20 bean "teeth" to our picture.  It was a great counting project for the kiddos!

 

 

We painted on a tooth shape with glue and glitter and toothbrushes! 

I LOVE glitter!

 

 

In science we talked about stains on our teeth.  We painted with tea bags to demonstrate this!

 

 

 

I LOVE our bulletin board!

 

We made groundhogs and talked about groundhog's day!  We asked the kids if they thought the groundhog would see his shadow and we used their art project to graph YES or NO!

 

 

Sarah came out to play!  We put up our mats and pet Sarah during one of our Science centers.  We also got to pet our guinea pig, Brownie and give him carrots.

 

 

 

More photos of us brushing our teeth from our science experiment...

 

 

 

One of our other fun projects was cutting out photos of food in magazines.  We then sorted the food onto our healthy (white) and unhealthy (yellow) teeth. 

 

 

We had a fun and really busy week and are VERY excited for Valentine Week!

 

Miss Danielle