July Overview

Sorry I haven't gotten to post as much!  We've had a busy summer so far...it's been full of exciting and wet water days and special events such as the fire safety day and a visit from the Lehigh Valley Zoo with a snake, turtle, sloth and even an owl!

I'm wrapping up a couple weeks of curriculum into one post so enjoy!!!  I'm sorry if I miss some things, but I tried to take as many pictures are possible...

Here is a picture of our Pirate Sensory tub filled with treasure, coins and necklaces!!  We have a lot of fun sensory tubs each week.  We have this blue one which stays the same every day and two clear tubs that we change out during the week.  We use a variety of different tools such as measuring cups, wooden spoons, bowls, big and little cups, whisks, spatulas, etc.

These sharks are from ocean week!  We colored them blue, added lots of teeth and wrote what we would eat if we were sharks!  We got pretty interesting answers.  Our kiddos are so imaginative!!  Miss Vanessa made sharks with us in the afternoon as well that had big teeth.  Later in the week we learned about whale sharks that have white polka dots, so we used a technique where we drew circles with crayons and painted over them with watercolors.  They turned out so cool.  During ocean week we also listed our favorite animals, and the shark definitely was the favorite.

Here are our big pirate from last week's Island Adventure curriculum.  Our pirates turned out really cute and the kids had fun adding their own touches such as the faces, stripes and bandana decorations.  The pirate's shirt reflects their favorite color!  Our favorite part was the peg leg!!!

Circle time is one of my favorite parts of the day because it brings all the kids together and it's really cute to hear them sing, greet each other and learn lots of new skills!  We cover days of the week, months of the year, the weather, letter, shape and name identification, the date and pattern.  We have a flag holder, pointer picker and a weather helper.  We will soon add a line leader and caboose! 

 This is our new listening chart...We use Mr. Potato head!  He starts...NAKED!...the kids love it.  (they love saying naked! lol)  They add the pieces and list the rules.  Below are the rules that apply to each piece.  If someone breaks a rule during the day, we refer back to Mr. Potato Head.

Here's our Monkeys in a barrel sensory tub. 

 It is simple but the kids LOVE this tub! 

They especially love the sparkly beads!!!

Monkeys in a barrel are one of their favorite center activities! 

During Island Adventure week we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and made our own coconut trees (without coconuts...oops!!!).  We used the leaf cut outs to make a palm tree, wrote/traced our names and counted how many letters we have in our names.  This is one of the many activities we are using right now to learn our names and the letters in them.  We are doing great!!!

I know this is hard to see, but this is our Princess dress up.  We have our fairy tale curtain, princess dress, prince shirt, goblets, tiaras, crowns and of course our dollhouse.  Our dollhouse recently came back down from the attic and the kids are in L-O-V-E with it!!  I also bought foam swords for medieval week but that will need to be closely supervised!

Here are our watercolor paper plate fish from ocean adventure week!  They were super cute :)

The kiddos also LOVE having their hands painted!  We made a parrot and added our colorful handprints as the wings.  Their tails were the cutest part of the parrot.

Who doesn't the Little Mermaid?  We read the story and made mermaids in art.  We covered the mermaid with green tissue paper for the tail, added glitter and yarn hair!  They even made the mermaids to look like they were swimming!  Some of the beautiful mermaids even had pretty earrings and necklaces. :)

This is our safe place...we use it when kids are upset or just need

a place to sit to cool down or relax away from the group.

These were our math number octopii.  We counted out 8 legs, glued them on the

back and practiced writing numbers 1-8 on the bottom of the legs.  This is something we will be working on during our school year.

We used our knights to protect our wooden castles!

We dyed our water table blue to look like the ocean and sailed our boats...(it's more fun to put our hands in and see if they turn blue).  This has been a fun activity this week!

Here are some of the kiddos making name shields.  We talked about how

knights used shields to protect themselves.  They loved painting them with dot markers.

Here are some of our shields on the bathroom doors...

more...

During Island Adventure Week, Miss Vanessa took us on a treasure hunt around our classroom

and we found a treasure chest!  This was the map we had to follow to get there! :)

We do a lot of other fun activities as well during our math and alphabet centers during the week!

On a personal note...

My husband, Joe and I are having another boy!

Travis will be having a brother in December and...

HE IS CRAWLING! :)

Check back for more updates!!!

:) Danielle

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...