Hearts Everywhere!

  We drew and located and thought about hearts all week!  The children became quite adept at drawing or tracing hearts on their own!

We read this cute story about a little girl who places hearts all over her house.  Afterwards, we found hearts all over the room . . .

Then we sorted them by size and color and put them in order from largest to smallest.  It's great to be able to use whatever holiday is at hand to teach the children some math skills. . . 

and then it turned into an art project as we used the hearts we found to make some pictures.

We decorated bags to keep and deliver our Valentines in.

We made a map of what is "in our hearts."  This began with a discussion of who and what we love; including people, pets, toys, places and food!  This also led to a list of what we "don't like."  I was very impressed that the children each had a very specific book to mention as a favorite!

As a fun surprise, each class received a new tea set that we could paint, each of us having our own cup and saucer to make into our very own.  We collaborated to paint the little tea pot!

They did a great job.

We took advantage of some of the candy around everywhere and read "Five Little Candy Hearts," which points out the words printed on this candy and also calls on us to count.  Then, each child received a handful of the hearts and we counted them and sorted by color.  This was a good way for me to assess the children's current counting skills, as well as abilities with one to one correspondence, which is a milestone for this age group.

On Valentine's Day, we decorated cookies, delivered and received Valentines (a learning experience in itself - thank you for the parent support in making Valentines!) AND we were able to use our new tea sets with some "Sweetie Pie Punch".

Receiving Valentines was almost like Christmas all over again!

In other events of the week, it was very important for Bridget to carry the snack basket to the table one day and some of us worked very hard on continuing to count and place counters well into 10!  Good job!

Outside is a whole other realm, where the children are (mostly) in charge of the play.  We have been loving the teeter totter and playing "airport" - the children insist that ALL play.

Thanks for the group-shot, Erica!

Who doesn't love noodles?

Our curriculum lately has been fueled by cooking projects.  This week we tried packaged spaghetti compared to noodles we made by hand!  Below Anders exhibits his technique for consuming noodles.

Flour is an essential part of noodle-making.   Nabil shows us how his dad taught him to clear off the top of the cup of flour with the spoon for accurate measuring!

We made a little burrow in the flour for the egg...

After taking turns mixing by hand, we employed Jill's food processor.

It was loud, but made a good dough for us!

We roll it out.

Then help each other crank the pasta machine.

Boom!  Pasta!

We also had fun crushing spices with a mortar and pestle, even though we didn't use the spices...

We also "practiced" making spaghetti with our play dough.

I placed some numbers out and the children put counters down for each number.

I just had up to 10.  Noe asked for 11 and 12.  Good practice recognizing the numbers, ordering them and placing an actual number of objects with each number.

We enjoyed water coloring this week too.

The T/Th group spent a lot of time building a house in the blocks.

They got cozy and read books together in their house later.

Colin concentrates on beading...

And Jane and Colin decided they wanted to re-enact Humpty Dumpty again.

A very busy week!