Retelling an old story, The Three Bears...

This week we read and re-enacted over and over, the story of The Three Bears.

The children enjoyed verbalizing the story to themselves through our three bears sets and our plastic bears.  We also called lots of attention to things that are small, medium and large!

Several children created their own ending to the story, such as Summer's idea that they all made friends and the bears invited Goldilocks to live with them.  We questioned a lot about why would a little girl go into a stranger's home (I did give the suggestion that long ago, perhaps it was ok to seek shelter and food if you were lost and hungry).  We also talked a lot about the different feelings the bears felt as they found their house disheveled.

We even played the story out in the play dough.

The children really enjoyed using props around the room to play act the story together.

We also worked very hard on adding features to our people pictures...

We used Jill's popper to make popcorn - we observed the difference in how the kernels look before and after popping.

We added our own salt... a learning experience in itself - I emphasized a pinch!

They were elated to see it start popping!

After observing the children enjoy finding pieces of ice on the playground, we played with some colored ice this week.

This became an experiment in absorbency and melting!

When ice becomes water, it's still cold, observes Anders...

 

Our Thanksgiving "gift" to parents is learning how to set our table...these place mattes will come home this week...

And we made our own porridge!

Everyone ate it up - we even went on a pretend walk to make sure it had cooled!

Porridge . . .

inspired by The Three Bears   

3/4 cup Acini di Pepe pasta . 1 and a half cups water. 1 Tblspn butter . 1 egg . 1/4 cup parmesan cheese . 

1 Tblspn olive oil  .

 (and for grown ups: 1 tspn  

black truffle oil drizzled on top makes this decadent!)

Cook the pasta at a rolling boil for 10 minutes (until most of liquid is absorbed), turn heat to low, thoroughly mix in butter, mix in egg already beaten, add parmesan, mix vigorously, take off heat, put into small “baby bear size” bowls and top with a drizzle of olive oil (or truffle oil, yum!) And watch out for little curly haired blond girls! 

Outside, Summer has found a way to "display" our shovels!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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!