Using Children's Literature as a Vehicle for Curriculum

Why are all the preschoolers putting on lots of hats?  They were imitating the Peddler in the classic story, Caps for Sale!

We engaged in many activities surrounding this story about the peddler who kept all of his (17!) caps balanced on top of his head.  He takes a nap under a tree and some monkeys steal his caps...

So, we painted our own Caps for Sale Tree...we learned how to make brown for the trunk by mixing all of the primary colors together.

Later we colored some monkeys and practiced with
our scissors - we have some interesting scissor-grips
(typical for this age) so we will work on this again in the
future!


We then glued our monkeys to the tree! Just like in the
story...


We also made personal trees out of salt dough to take home.



We drew the caps on the peddler.  Below, Summer made her own peddler - we are working on creating faces in preschool...



We did a LOT of block building this week.  We took turns, below to add a block at a time - the tallest we made was over 20 blocks.  This took patience in taking turns and a steady hand to balance each block...

Bridget also made a train for the dinosaurs.

Jane had fun modeling to the M/W group how we took turns making a structure with our blue blocks.

I took the picture below because the whole group was sitting nicely, criss-cross applesauce, and singing AND clapping their hands - this has taken a long time to coordinate, so I was proud of them!!

I got out my sorting bears Thursday to get ready for reading The Three Bears next week.  The bears are different colors, but also three different sizes.

Summer enjoyed sorting by color...

Jane sorted by color and size.  Good job, girls!

We realized the T/Th group all have an E in their name, so we practiced E's everywhere - below, Summer did one with watercolor on the easel.

Noe and Anders played nicely with the cars then worked together to put them away.  The kids are learning to lovingly take care of the things in our room!

More, kid-initiated block building...nice!

A fun picture with the girls ALL painting happily together.  Great conversations here too.

A VERY productive week!