Sports Theme

This past week was sports week and we had so much fun learning about different sports and athletes such as Michael Jordan, who we learned was 6 foot 6 inches tall!!!  We painted with different types of sports equipment such as basketballs, footballs and golf balls.  We read books such as Curious George at the Baseball Game, T is for Touchdown and H is for Homerun.  We sang songs such as "Take me out to the ball game" and even enjoyed some ice cream on a hot summer day!

Our first art activity of the week was to paint with basketballs.  We got some neat textures on our balls.  We hung those up with our first name sticker penants.  We practiced spelling our names with letter stickers to make these colorful penants.

Below were our footballs!  We painted with footballs, added glitter and added our handprints to make it look like we are catching the football!  They turned out so cute! :)

We worked hard cutting out our circular baseballs.  We worked very hard cutting and cutting circles is an extremely difficult task but we did such a great job!!  We then traced the lines on a baseball and used our fingers with stamps to make the laces on the baseball!! "Pre-K Knocked it out of the park!!"

We also talked about our favorite numbers and made colorful basketball

 jerseys with our name and number on the back! 

We also worked on strenghtening our fine motor skills by cutting strips of

different colored paper in the sensory tub!

We also did some other neat activities like sorting the letter Bb for baseball, matching capital and lowercase letters, played dancing games with our wrist ribbons and played with our sports equipment.  We marbled painted with golf balls in art on friday and enjoyed water day and getting Miss Vanessa soaking wet on Thursday.  It was so hot this week so we enjoyed some inside activities like coloring in the hallway!!

Don't forget: Water Day is this Friday!!!

We have so much fun getting wet and letting our teachers SOAK us! :)

This week is "If You Give A...Week" so we are reading stories such as If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, If You Give A Pig A Pancake,  and If You Take A Mouse to the Movies!  Check back next week to see the fun activities we did!

Have a great week!

:) Danielle

Summer's Here!

This past month has been so crazy!!!!

Our graduation was June 1st and it was a proud and very emotional day!  The kids performed great!!!  I will miss this class terribly.  We said good-bye to some our friends but also welcomed some new friends this past week!

We are looking forward to a great summer!  Keep checking back for updates!

Gardening Week

What a dreary week for Gardening week!...I had a ton of plans to dig in our dirt box, plant seeds and weed.  We didn't get to do any of it and this week has been more of the same...rainy :( Oh well! We did get to do some fun activities inside though and I can't wait to share them with you.

We started off the week talking about vegetables.  We painted with vegetables!  We used potatoes, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli and peppers with lots of different colored paints!  They turned out really cute and were all very different...

We had also talked about different colors of fruits and veggies and also worked on sorting and counting veggies!

For some reason I L-O-V-E worms.  I think they are so neat, and fortunately for me, I have a job in which I get to play with them!  The kids love them too!  I bought 50 red worms from the gas station! lol :)  We examined them, touched them (and washed our hands afterwards of course), picked them up and drew our own drawings of them.  I forgot to take pictures of the drawings but they are super cute!

We even painted with gummy worms! :)

One of our themes was worms AND snails so we completed a shape matching worksheet and colored the snail at the bottom.  It was great for reinforcing shapes!!

Touching Worms!

On Friday we worked on our sunflowers.  We cut around the yellow circle to create the "petals".  It's neat to see how some kiddos cut little snips close together and some cut using big snips and space them far apart!  They used a paintbrush and black paint to make the "seeds" of the sunflower and added the leaves and stems.

We also worked on the parts of the flower.  Miss Becky gave them four pieces to put together the flower puzzle and than talked about what parts of a flower we know.  The older kids were able to identify the beginning sound of the word and knew where to put it...these kids amaze me! :)

This was Miss Cindy's favorite activity of the week!  I even let her play it not once, but TWICE!  The object of the game is to get the most beans but you have to count out your own beans and also count the number on the dice so you know how many spaces to travel!  The kids did a great job!!!

Mr. Jason was being silly helping our friends in art!!

Being an photographer on the side, I had to take advantage of May being "National Photography Month".  I found this neat program that makes photographs into polaroids.  I am (secretly) fascinated with polaroid cameras and really want to own one!!  Mr. Jason made the camera and I took the photos and turned them black and white because I like black and white photographs a lot!

 This was our dramatic play area for the last two weeks.  It's hard to see but we have flowers, watering cans, cameras and binoculars, bug nets and bugs in addition to our baby dolls and dollhouse!

We love our outside time!  The kids really want to play with the chalk and bubbles lately!  We always bring one of our sensory tubs outside as well.  Here are some of the chalk drawings from the week!

 The picture below is me (drawn by Miss Cindy I think) and the girls added the details.  Baby Travis is upside down on my shoulder which really makes me laugh.  The kicker to this picture is if you look closely I have a yellow circle on my chest and that's "Miss Danielle's new baby"...

Most of you don't know but I am 9 weeks pregnant (crazy I know...) but none of the kids know that! LOL...Baby #2 is due 12/12/12.  We are hoping that it's not a Christmas baby.  Going through birth at one holiday (Thanksgiving) was enough!!  I can't wait to share this journey, yet again, with all of you!  I have the most supportive classroom parents ever and I thank you all so much!!!!

Have a great week!

:) Danielle

Earth Week

It was Earth Week!  I forgot my camera all week...whoops...so I could only take pictures of some of our art work but I'll try to fill in the blanks as best as I can!  We had lots of trash to recycle this week in our dramatic play center and we did a good job figuring out what was trash and what was not!  We even used big trucks to haul our trash away!  On Thursday and Friday we even built with our trash...we had an Earth themed sensory tub with green dried peas and marbles that looked like the Earth.

This was actually the middle of the week craft.  We made owls for our slogan, "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute"...they turned out super cute!  They all look the same, but some have eyelashes, lines on their bellies and funny feet! :)

These were our fingerprint trees.  They turned out super colorful!  The kids love fingerpainting, smearing and having fun with paints...

This might be my favorite craft of all time and it was so fun for the kids...I found this idea on Pinterest (where else?? lol)...The kids used blue and green markers to color a coffee filter and than sprayed it with water and we let it dry.  Miss Becky and I painted their hands a neat blue color so it looked like they were "holding" the earth in their hands!

On Monday and Tuesday we read the story of The Lorax and talked about why we should take care of the trees.  Our three part craft was to make the Lorax character, watercolor the background and than add the truffula trees because truffula trees are what everyone needs!  A lot of the kids knew who the Lorax was from the movie! :)

We also worked really hard to explain what would make the Earth happy and sad.  We talked about things like air and water pollution, smoke, and garbage make the Earth sad.  Things like recycling, throwing away trash, and planting the garden make the Earth happy!

We had a great week learning about the Earth but are very excited about gardening week next week!  We will be playing with worms! :)

...Danielle...

Outer Space

This week was all about Outer Space.  We spent a lot of time learning the names of the planets and what order they are in the solar system.  There favorite planets are definitely Jupiter and Saturn :)  On Monday we spent a lot of time ordering the planets in art and coloring them the appropriate colors.  We also read a planet book about the order of the planets in space.

On Tuesday we talked a lot about the Earth.  We discussed what the blue and green represent on the Earth (water and land).  We made Earths in art by adding green land pieces to our blue circle and drawing stars with white chalk.

On Thursday we made moons in art.  We FINGERPAINTED and the kids loved it!!!  We also sprayed on diluted white paint to make it look like the sky!:)  We talked about when we see the moon and sun in the sky!  We worked on number order from 1-15 by making a rocket ship and also worked on preprinting different types of lines with expo markers!



In our writing center we wrote and brainstormed what we would do if we were astronauts.  It's hard to see but this student wrote "go to the min (moon)"...

This little one said that she would eat cheese on the moon and spin around in her

spaceship with Mr. Jason and Miss Danielle!! :)



Also in our writing center we practiced spelling our names by making rocket ships.  You can see them on the door to our classroom.  The kiddos had to count how many letters they had in their name, glue down that many squares and write one letter on each square.  They turned out super cute! :)

On Friday we read Aliens Love Underpants and talked all about underpants which was the highlight of their week :)  We decorated alien underpants and talked about what is our favorite kind of underpants.  Surprisingly most of the kiddos liked rainbow underpants, even the boys!  They were super silly!  On Friday we also worked on different skills in our writing/reading center such as matching shapes, completing alien patterns and writing words/sentences.



We had two fun sensory tubs this week.  This was our black bean, star and astronaut figurine outer space tub.  We also had moon sand and moon dough in our other tub.  Our third tub went outside with us most days and was filled with birdseed.  We will be changing that this week and hopefully the weather is a little nice so we can continue to go outside!  

 The neatest part of the week was our Living in Rhythm program on Friday.  This man came and taught the kiddos tribal songs, dance and let them play drums.  The kids (and teachers), especially Miss Cindy, had a lot of fun!  We learned about different types of nature instruments from leaves, seashells, guords and more!

We are gearing up for Earth Week this week!

Visit the Alcoa Eagle Cam Site at http://www.alcoa.com/locations/usa_davenport/en/info_page/eaglecam.asp...

we have been watching the eagles grow up ande now they are getting big!

:) Danielle

Weather Week

This week was all about Weather!!  On Monday we talked about the sun.  We made our own suns out of circles and triangles and than told our teachers what we know about the sun!  We worked on beginning sounds and matched the clothing picture to the appropriate weather we would wear it in!

 Of course we had to talk a little about snow.  The students made their own snowmen with white circles, a carrot nose, buttons and then drew eyes, a mouth and arms.  We then used our popcorn painting bags to make it snow! 

We also worked on the letter /S/ for snow and snowman in our alphabet center!

Another art project we did this week was talk about wind and make kites!  We used out dot markers which the kids always LOVE because they get to bang as much as they want.  We added bows to make them fly!

Wednesday we talked about couds. We made clouds in art with different textures such as felt, newspaper, wax paper, construction paper, etc.  They turned out really cute.  Below are our clouds that Mr. Jason made us.  Each cloud is a different type! 

A new feature in our classroom that I added in the last week is our Nature Table.  It is in the science center and houses all kinds of things from a real turtle shell to seashells, pinecones and birds nests.  The students LOVE to explore with their magnifying glasses and it is neat to see them really enjoy the outdoors.

This week we also made rainy day portraits in which they had to draw themselves and add the raincoat, boots, hat and umbrella.  Some also drew raindrops and they had to write/dictate what they like to do in the rain.  The example below is one of our older kiddos who wrote "I like to jump in mude (muddy) pudls (puddles) in the rain".

On Friday we talked about wind.  I "borrowed" Mr. Mike's fan and we gathered objects around the room and HYPOTHESIZED! about which objects would blow or not blow.  We determined that the objects that did NOT blow in the wind were too heavy.  We used blocks, balloons, a feather, tissue, paint brush, styrofoam ball, a hat, pen, pencil, a picture, tray and a beach ball amoung other things.  After we experimented with the fan we decided to try to make our own wind!!!...We used straws and watered down paint to blow the paint around the paper.  It turned out really neat!

 We also had a fun day outside!  We played with chalk and drew lots of hearts...correction: Miss Danielle drew everyone hearts and then they worked on drawing hearts themselves! :)

Mr. Jason did bubbles and we explored with birdseed in our sensory tub!  We had a great week and can't wait for OUTER SPACE week!!! :)

Have a great weekend

:) Danielle