Happy Day After St. Patrick's Day!

                          The afternoon class took some fun St. Patrick's Day photo booth pictures!

           The morning students drank all their green milk....even if we weren't too sure about the green.

   Reading with friends in the library center...using pointers to "read" the words.

Today we painted with primary colors on a black and white grid. The children were so careful with their painting.  I love how they all turned out so different.

Black and White Week

 

 We are enjoying seeing the contrast between black and white this week in preschool and TK.

Black and white paint at the easel on black paper. 

 The morning classes painted with black and white paint on black and white paper.....

 We noticed that when we mixed the black and white paint, we made gray.

 The morning classes also made some lovely black and white sticker collages.  The children enjoyed making their designs and some of them even saw pictures in what they created (one little girl said her creation was a pond and another said her's was a unicorn covered in snow).

Transportation Activities

 We have been learning about transportation in the three year old classes.  We painted with cars.....

and made a stoplight we could eat during snack time.

Our Beautiful Alphabet

To celebrate the end of our first alphabet review this year, the TK class made the alphabet out of collage materials we had in our classroom.  It turned out great and we are enjoying it in our library center.  This center has been very popular since our 100th day of school.  The children practice their counting and literacy skills here.  There is also a calendar with numbers they can manipulate.  We have seen lots of pretend school play :)

Blast off!

 Our housekeeping center was transformed to a space station during the long weekend!  The children had fun pretending to fly a space ship and live on the space station today :)

Happy Birthday, Bailey!  We had red juice and napkins today to reinforce the sign and Spanish word for red. 

President's Day TK Activities

 The TK class spent this short week at school learning some facts about former presidents of the United States.  We learned about the American flag, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama.  The children impressed me with the knowledge that they already had about some of our country's symbols! 

 Thanks to free printables offered by Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten, we worked on these portraits for Washington and Lincoln.

Color Study....Red/Rojo

The morning class began our color study this week.  All of our activities and many of our centers are focused on the color red. The red rice in the sensory table smells so good--rice scented with strawberry Kool Aid.

Our art project on Tuesday was red paint with baking soda mixed in.  We painted red hearts.....

     

Next we used eye droppers to add vinegar to our paintings.  Some of us liked how the vinegar smelled and some of us did not.

                                            Using those eyedroppers is great exercise for our fingers!

     We got to watch and listen to the tiny bubbles as the vinegar mixed with the baking soda in the paint. 

Shades of Orange

We painted with shades of orange paint in preschool this morning. Some of us were very careful to keep each orange shade separate while others mixed and mixed the oranges. We printed black pumpkins on our finished paintings.

More TK Activities

Now that I am finally getting pictures uploaded again, here are a couple more. Last week during our Community Helpers theme, we flipped foam "cookies" with spatulas. We matched the letters on the back of the cookies to the cookies on our paper cookie sheets. This week we have been learning more about nocturnal animals. Following a discussion on the book, Nightime, a nonfiction book about nocturnal animals, we made these paintings. The first step was to color the eyes of the nocturnal animals and the letters on the paper with a yellow crayon. Then we brushed black liquid watercolor onto our papers. The yellow crayon resisted the paint, causing the eyes to appear to be glowing.

Community Helpers

We ended our Community Helpers theme last week, but I could not resist sharing some of the pictures of the TK class pretending to be bakers. We made these fun baker's hats with old bulletin board border and whte plastic bags.

Ducks and Chalk Drawings

A big thank you to Bayley's mom and grandpa for bringing some ducks in for us to touch and observe. They were so soft and cute! We celebrated the ducks by singing the Five Little Ducks.

Chalk drawings made on the playground during afternoon recess. I love all the details!

Peanut Butter and Jelly

Last week the Tuesday class painted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We were short a few students that day, so everyone got to paint a slice of bread with "peanut butter" and "jelly" We started by painting the peanut butter........

and then the jelly. Grape jelly, of course.

After we painted, we put our two slices of bread together and rubbed.

Carefully pulled it apart............

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

Beach Day!

We had a blast on Beach Day! Thank you to Dorothy for all her wonderful "beachy" ideas!

Rhyming Dust Bunnies

We are so glad that Dorothy introduced us to the fun rhyming book, The Rhyming Dust Bunnies! It has quickly become one of our favorites in the afternoon. The dust bunnies are a group of friends that like to rhyme. Except Bob. He is always off task with his rhyming and looking out for brooms and vacuums.

On Monday after we read a new Rhyming Dust Bunnies book, we made some dust bunnies to hang on the door. We each came up with a rhyming word for our dust bunnies.

Transportation and Color Mixing

The afternoon class is learning about primary colors and how we can use primary colors to make new colors. After we read Mouse Paint on Tuesday, we mixed yellow, blue, and red to make a color wheel.

We will be adding the letter R to our Letter Sounds song on Thursday!

Fun counting and fine motor work at the Toys and Puzzles center.

These colorful garages have been very popular in the block center in both the morning and afternoon sessions of preschool this week.

Building Humpty Dumpty's Wall

We had so much fun at our Valentine's Day parties! Thank to all the families
that provided treats, juice, napkins and valentines for our class.

Nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" like the Freeze Dance while wearing

our valentine crowns.

We are all such good friends!

In the morning classes, we built Humpty Dumpty a wall to sit on. For this activity the three year

olds are working on number identification and counting. Plus the added fine

motor challenge of building the tiny wall and balancing the egg on top.

Balancing the egg takes a lot of concentration!

It was fun to knock Humpty off the wall :)