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.

 

Do you have a collection?

This week the children were invited to bring in anything they collect, to share, sort and count together as a class.  This was a neat way for us to get to know more about each other's interests and also provided the opportunity to hone in the early math skills that sorting offers.

I have been using charts and graphs recently to show the children different ways of communicating information on paper - here we all signed in if we brought in a collection.  We are all learning how to form an "x".

 Kaden brought some trains . . .

 Lilya brought her rubber duck collection.  We sorted them by size and facial expressions!

 Jane brought in some cool shape blocks.  We got out the overhead projector and enjoyed playing with them and making new shapes!

 Camille brought in her barrette collection . . .we sorted them by color and noticed almost all of them had  a flower on them.

Elliott brought in a cool shell collection - we were able to sort these by shapes, colors and sizes!

Owen brought in a diverse collection of toy cars.

Jill provided a plethora of fun
and colorful items for the
children to sort and many
containers to sort them in.

We decided to sort our small stuffed animal collection.  We learned that we have a lot of stuffed cats!

Children sorted paper shapes and made shape-pictures . . .

The children so love have "tea" that we have made it almost a daily ritual (with water as our tea usually).  This has been a fun way for us to practice control pouring with a pitcher, as well as a nice way to enhance togetherness as we take turns pouring for each other.

The beginning of January was full of THREE big birthdays of three of our boys turning THREE!  Happy Birthday to Kaden, Owen and Elliott!

 More vignettes of our week . .

Elliott helped Owen put his shoe on outside.

Elliott started an interest in playing "store".  Here he reads his list.

We measured our heights this week working very hard using the Unifix blocks!  This took a lot of patience for the child being measured!  But everyone was excited to see how tall we were.  We were all within one or two blocks of each others' height.  I realized the children are accustomed to hearing how "big" they are, so rather than highlight who was tallest or smallest, we created a bar graph that compared their sizes to a mouse or an elephant, learning that they were all in between the sizes of those two animals.

Lilya and Jane noticed that their dresses were similar.

We realized that we did not get enough messy sensory play this week, so the children each made their own bowl of playdough.  They chose how much of each ingredient and the color of their mixture.

The M/W/F class read the colorful book, The Big Orange Splot, about a man who has a house that looks like everyone else's until a seagull drops orange paint on his roof.  He decides to work with the splot rather than against it (see below). 

The kids enjoyed making a big box into their own Orange Splot house.  They worked on decorating the box throughout the week.

Happy New Year!

We celebrated coming back to school and the new year by engaging in some Chinese New Year activities such as drinking tea, eating rice, sampling fortune cookies and making a wish with a penny.

Last week's pictures will combine the M/W/F and T/Th classes in the interest of time.

We compared what the rice looked and felt like before and after it was cooked.  Below, Lilya enjoys her rice with our kid-friendly chopstick - she did a great job!

Some of us found that the rice was sticky and stuck like velcro to our clothes.  Elliott thought this was pretty funny.

Owen enjoying his tea. . .

Santa brought us a fun new pretend pizza to play with!

We made New Year's noise-makers with Jack...

and cut up confetti to throw at the end of the day - our own New Year's party!

We also enjoyed making popcorn with Jill's new popcorn maker.  We noticed how the popcorn sure looks different before you pop it and it is fun to watch it pop!  It was a nice, warm snack that day. 

Everyone also received a special coin to put in their treasure box.

I also observed a lot of growth in the children tending more towards some representational drawing...

They love the big paper!