Sunday, January 29, 2012




What's your favorite color?
This week we investigated color as we explored the fun book, Pete the Cat.  Pete loves his white shoes and sings a song about them until he steps in a large pile of strawberries!  Then his shoes become red.  He steps in a series of items that are different colors and turn his shoes various colors.  A fun way to make the children aware of the colors of things around them.


We immediately looked at the color of our shoes. . .


and then we traced our shoes and colored them.


Zoe did a great job of noticing the color of her shoes and straps.


We each received a paper shoe to color whatever color we wanted.  Later we looked in the room for items that were the same color as our shoes.


We decorated our own "Pete the Cat".


And we played a matching game.  The pictures only had small differences between them so the children really needed to pay attention to match them up.  Our week was full of paying attention to details.

Other colorful details of our week included the following. . .


Karsten drew a beautiful rainbow!

 

 We enjoyed mixing colors at the easel.


 We worked on "how many is 10?" and recognizing some numbers.



Jane brought in a Dr. Suess book and played teacher by showing us the pictures at meeting time.


A special treat this week was mixing our own color of frosting to frost a cookie!






We made two different colors of play dough. . .



Zoe and Camille did puzzles together.


Our T/Th group loves to play under the table and pretend together!


Camille brought in colorful oranges for us to share.



We created colorful glue paintings!



Look how focussed Karsten is on this task!


There is always time for snuggling together with a book!


At the end of the week, the M/W/F group created a book together, following the format of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear".  


And we learned the fun song, "Ram, Sam, Sam", where we slap the floor with both hands and recite fun nonsense words - they loved it!


A great week!

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Let's go shopping!

Inspired by Elliott's desire to imitate life, we created our own grocery store this week!



The children made lists, bagged purchases and finalized transactions with "Milestone Money", buttons for coins and "credit cards" (below).




After shopping the children created their "bus" with the chairs and went for a picnic (below).  Our store was a great opportunity for using verbal language and imagination as we pretend play.


Elliott took everyone on a picnic after they got off of the "bus".


 We made new playdough this week and I observed that everyone's getting much better at forming snakes!  Look at all of Jane's!  This is nice proof of improving fine motor skills!


The M/W/F group also had an impromptu pancake-flipping and eating lesson. . .



Another spotlight in curriculum this week centered around this new book I got at Xmas.

Our bear friend can't
find his hat.  He asks a series of animals and then realizes that 
he had seen the bunny wearing it, and eventually gets
his hat back.  
  
Suddenly there were red, triangular hats everywhere!





We also  enjoyed playacting the story!


 I am using some of the literature we read to generate questions for the children to answer.


We made faces with the hats on top of them and even made hats for ourselves and our stuffed animals.



I recently brought in some more of my wood block set and have been encouraging the children to construct more complicated buildings.



Other pieces of our week . . .


Making "lists" with our pretend writing.


Being cozy together...


Playing "tractor".


Using fine motor skills to put golf tees in and out of the styrofoam.


We can see each other through the plexiglass easel so I took the paper off and we used shaving cream.


The weather was so nice Friday and we only had three kiddos, so we took a wagon ride over to the Regis grassy areas.  A little running,


tree hugging and rolling down hills.


 Isn't this tree beautiful?  We are lucky to have this area across the street.