Thursday, October 25, 2012

Solidifying our learning through a wide variety of related activities . . .

We began our week making pumpkins in a wide variety of ways.  Below, paper bag pumpkins required us to stuff a paper bag, get help tying it shut and then mixing colors to paint it.





Above, Summer and Anders were very thorough in painting their pumpkins.


Bridget and Joy enjoyed painting with their hands.


Since Summer missed a day last week, Jane helped her remember our 5 Little Pumpkins song.  As the days go by we sing the song, look at the sequencing cards for it, read a book about the pumpkins, make our own book and play act the song with our own play dough pumpkins and our plastic pumpkins.  I think everyone knows the song pretty well now!


And we had the opportunity to color our own book of the song to take home.


Look how diligently the kids worked on their books!


We each also got our own little pumpkin to paint and decorate.





Pretty Pumpkins!


The children asked to get out the doctor stuff the other day (below).  Jane and Noe played for a long time as patient and doctor.


This then turned into, "let's get cozy on the 'train'.  Anders joined in, too.



Summer is great at "reading" stories to herself.  She said, "When I don't know what is says, I make something up."  Great Summer!


Below, Jane and Anders made a house for the dinosaurs together.

 


Later, Anders cleaned up the blocks so neatly!! 

 

Thursday we had fun checking out our first snow.  Our favorite tree looked pretty snowy (left).
Below the kids liked to "hide" under the tree . . .


Thursday we read the Eric Carle story, Papa, please get the moon for me and then painted our own moon!



 Colin loves to sing "This Old Man" so we found the book and read it together!


A very busy and productive week!  They are growing so much!





Sunday, October 21, 2012

How Many Legs Does a Spider Have?


8!  That's right Jane!  
This week we did lots of activities involving spiders . . .

We drew them . . .



And we made them out of puff balls and pipe cleaners.  We found out that spiders have more than two eyes!


It took some coordination and patience to glue our legs onto the spiders.  Below, Jane helps Summer.


 

Above, we made spiders out of peanut butter playdough and counted out 8 pretzel sticks for the legs.


We made a giant spider web, too, and practiced "capturing" bugs to eat!


We colored a new batch of play dough orange and decided to make our own 5 Little Pumpkins to take home!




The kids had a nice time all together while Bridget made us all "dinner".



On our weekly walk we noticed more and more yellow leaves and the leaves completely off of one of our favorite trees, above right.


Everyone found a very BIG leaf on the ground to bring back and noticed our long shadows on the sidewalk . . .


 
On an especially windy day we played a game with a pingpong in the hallway.


We decided to make long snakes with another batch of playdough.


On Friday we had some fun with our vehicles.  Nabil made a train and Noe and Bridget like to spontaneously line up and order the cars!




Then we had an "orange snack" of cheese toast and orange juice!





And, the pumpkins were still having fun, riding around in our toy jeep!