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.
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!
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.
