A Chubby Little Snowman

The fingerplay we learned in January was about a chubby snowman.

A chubby little snowman........

Had a carrot nose.............

Along came a bunny....................

And what do you suppose??

That hungry little bunny...................

Looking for his lunch.....................

Ate the carrot nose with a nibble, nibble, CRUNCH!

Squares, squares everywhere!

In the preschool classes, we are learning all about squares. Last week we looked at squares and noticed that all the squares have four sides and all those sides are the same. We learned a song about squares. We started a shape book that we will add several pages to before we get to take them home. First we practiced cutting with scissors. Today we glued squares to small paper bags to make a quilt. It is so exciting to get the glue sticks out!


We are working hard on our square quilts.

We also worked together to make a colorful square collage that hangs in our classroom.

So bright and cheerful!

The Three Little Pigs--Preschool

We have been reading different versions of the three little pigs in preschool this week. It is such a fun story and our centers this week gave us lots of opportunities to retell it and act it out. During snack time today we enjoyed a Three Little Pig snack mix. We used shoestring potatoes for straw, pretzels for sticks and chocolate chunks for bricks. Some us sorted our snack into piles.
And some of us decided to keep it all together. It was delicious! Plus we got to talk about the story during snack time :)

The sensory table this week (borrowed from Dorothy) is a snowy forest scene. The children really enjoy setting up the scene and making it "snow" on the animals. The snow is actually potato flakes. Dorothy was nice to get us some fresh evergreens from her yard. They smell fabulous!

Igloos and Penguins--Pre K Activities

Since we have continued with our winter theme into this week, on Wednesday we learned more about the life cycle of a penguin. We made a book to take home that shows the life cycle--starting out with an egg, the penguin hatching, growing and changing colors, and then becoming the proud parent to another egg. The children really got a kick out of pretending to be a penguin and trying to walk holding an "egg" between their feet.

Today we read the book Mama, Do You Love Me? about an Intuit girl and her mother. It had a lot of new words we have never heard before. After we talked about the book, we made an igloo using blue paper and white labels. This is another great idea I found on the Frugal Family Fun website. It was great exercise for our fingers. We are going to be great writers next year!

Melt the ice cube game

The pre-k class enjoyed playing a dice game called "Melt the Ice Cube." This is a game I found on one of my favorite websites "Little Giraffes." Each number on the dice that we rolled had different method we could use to melt our ice cube. It was fun seeing whose ice cube melted the quickest. We got to sprinkle 10 sprinkles of salt if we rolled a 5.

If we rolled a 3, we got to blow on our ice cube for 10 seconds.

If we rolled a 6, we got to float our ice cube in water for 10 seconds. You might have heard talk at home of the favorite method. It was definitely the method listed for 2--put the ice cube down your shirt. More than one of the students rolled a 2 on purpose. :)

It's Cold Outside

Since we returned to school following Christmas break, the children have been busy with many new center time activities. One of the favorites is creating snowmen out of playdough.

The Friday preschool class painted snowflakes that were taped out on their papers. We used four different shades of paint and sponges for these paintings. (This is an idea I got from one of my favorite blogs, Frugal Family Fun. It's a great resource for fun activities you can do with items you probably already have at home.)

They are beautiful!

I added the preschool class's snowflakes to a display of polar bear paintings that the pre-k students painted. They enjoyed learning about how to add texture to their artwork by using different tools. For these paintings we added salt to watercolor paint for the sky and we put saran wrap over the blue tempera paint to make the snow/ice texture. We really enjoyed the results!