Letters, letters, letters . . .

Our continued "mail" theme brought about some good exercises in recognizing each other's names and great practice at holding our markers and using symbolic and representational forms to communicate with our letters to each other.  Below, Camille delivers a letter to Elliott.

Kaden stamps his letter . . .

Elliott enjoyed opening his mail and, below, we find that putting a letter in an envelope takes some fine motor skill!

Look how hard the kids worked at creating their mail!

Everyone made their own mail box this week.  Our names also had our pictures on them, to help us learn to recognize our names.

We enjoyed sorting candy hearts and reading a counting book about them.

We made some RED play dough . . .

One day we added glitter.

We did more color exploration as we read a book about the colors in a rainbow and then each child (below) identified a color and we drew our own rainbow.

We certainly had fun in the snow, too!

Jane very sweetly tried to help Kaden put his sock back on . . .

and then he eventually got it on all by himself!

We played "find the pink heart".  A fun and productive week!

What's in your heart?

 Yes, I do like to begin "Valentiney" curriculum as soon as February shows up!  I shared one of my favorite books with the kids, it has all sorts of visual maps, My Map Book, by Sara Fanelli.  Below, she illustrates a map of her heart and what is important to her.  We also explored this idea on paper below.

We also read a cute book called, Love Lola, Lola takes paper hearts and puts them all around the house for her family to find.  We did the same and then sorted the hearts by color and size.

We collected red things from around the room . . .

We spent some time gluing hearts to paper.

And we worked hard writing letters to you!  Below Kaden verbalizes some letters as he "writes" them.

Karsten decided to make lots of "pluses" on his letter.

Jane made a big smiley face.  We talked about what you can say in a letter.  You can say "I love you."  You can ask a question or tell some news.  The children told me what they wanted to say and I wrote if for them.

They enjoyed putting the stamp on - hopefully you have received these in the mail!  (T/TH I put in the mailbox today!)

We enjoyed other substances for painting, such as colored corn syrup.

The children enjoyed watching this sticky substance drip slowly from their brushes.

Pretty, transparent pictures . . .

Zoe enjoyed stacking the jars of pretty paint (above).

The T/TH group got their turn with glue painting.

We had giant paper this week to make drawings on.

 We love to wipe off the blackborad before we talk about our day, thank you Zoe!

For more information about Milestones Preschool, go to www.ready-to-learn.org.

What's your favorite color?

This week we investigated color as we explored the fun book, Pete the Cat.  Pete loves his white shoes and sings a song about them until he steps in a large pile of strawberries!  Then his shoes become red.  He steps in a series of items that are different colors and turn his shoes various colors.  A fun way to make the children aware of the colors of things around them.

We immediately looked at the color of our shoes. . .

and then we traced our shoes and colored them.

Zoe did a great job of noticing the color of her shoes and straps.

We each received a paper shoe to color whatever color we wanted.  Later we looked in the room for items that were the same color as our shoes.

We decorated our own "Pete the Cat".

And we played a matching game.  The pictures only had small differences between them so the children really needed to pay attention to match them up.  Our week was full of paying attention to details.

Other colorful details of our week included the following. . .

Karsten drew a beautiful rainbow!

 

 We enjoyed mixing colors at the easel.

 We worked on "how many is 10?" and recognizing some numbers.

Jane brought in a Dr. Suess book and played teacher by showing us the pictures at meeting time.

A special treat this week was mixing our own color of frosting to frost a cookie!

We made two different colors of play dough. . .

Zoe and Camille did puzzles together.

Our T/Th group loves to play under the table and pretend together!

Camille brought in colorful oranges for us to share.

We created colorful glue paintings!

Look how focussed Karsten is on this task!

There is always time for snuggling together with a book!

At the end of the week, the M/W/F group created a book together, following the format of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear".  

And we learned the fun song, "Ram, Sam, Sam", where we slap the floor with both hands and recite fun nonsense words - they loved it!

A great week!