Letters, Rudolph and "Snow"

We engaged in lots of seasonal, holiday activities this week, despite the unseasonal, balmy-like weather!

Below, Noe shows us that she has found one of the many small gingerbread cookies "hidden" around the room.

 

Our "writing" table became a great place to craft letters to Santa and Moms and Dads.  As you can see from our full mailbox, this was a successful endeavor!

This is a great way for the children to use all of those burgeoning drawing skills with a further purpose, to communicate through a letter to another person!

Getting the letter in the envelope can be challenging.  We are learning how to fold with a crease.  Below, Noe helps Summer.

Lots of singing of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer occurred this week.   Jane and Joy decided to play "Rudolph".

They created a sleigh out of chairs and instructed the others' how to say their parts...

We prepared a "hearth" or, fireplace, in order to have a place to hang our stockings.

Since we haven't had any snow to enjoy lately, we decided to make our own: shaving cream and blue paint.

Bridget likes to make handprints, so we got some paper out too.

The color became almost a Tiffany-blue. . . lovely!

We read the story about the Tomten,  an elf-like man who cares for the animals in the winter.  We made our own elf-ish hats and cared for our classroom animals.

There has been a wonderful enthusiasm surrounding cleaning, especially since we get to use the squirt bottle.  Look how clean they are getting that table!  Sometimes we forget to have snack we are so busy cleaning the table...

Summer painted a lovely tree this week!

We played a game with Noe's Dreidel.

...and enjoyed some hot cocoa.

We also made some pretty trees with glue and glitter - the children's gluing skills have really improved! (Meaning, they now understand that you stick things on paper with the glue, rather than enjoy the glue as a sensory/sticky experience... which we still do sometimes.)

While working with the playdough, Noe made her mom a bracelet!

A great week!

"Run, run, run as fast as you can!  You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"

This week's curriculum was full of activities surrounding the, somewhat seasonal, story, The Gingerbread Man!

The children practiced their gluing skills in making a paper Gingerbread person...

And we learned how to run in place as we play acted the story!

The culminating event was making a real Gingerbread Man...

Below, Summer mixes the wet ingredients: egg, oil and molasses - we enjoyed smelling all the spices that go into this cookie and it made the room smell so nice as he cooked!

We added his features with some colorful Skittles...

He needed a long time to cook so we went outside, but...oops!  When we came back he was gone!  There was a note left on our oven that told us to look for him.

There he is!  Naughty Gingerbread Man!

The children commented that they would be like the Fox in the story and have a bite.  We talked about the fact that cookies are made to be eaten.

So, here's the T/Th proof that they can all sit criss cross applesauce together at meeting time!

We made a new holiday picture for our blackboard...

 Snow men (people) were a subject this week too.  This was a good opportunity for us to intentionally draw circles and put them together to form a snow person!

Drawing, lately, can be infectious among the children.  Jane was drawing a skeleton so then Noe wanted to draw one.  Anders joined in, then Summer wanted to staple her papers together, so we all did that.  Noe "wrote" her mom a letter and I offered her an envelope and then I let the children know we would write some letters to Santa next week.

Our two Alpha Girls, Summer and Jane had a sweet moment playing in the pillows together at the end of the day...

And we continue to progress on our block building!

We pretended the shaving cream was snow.  We added some cars and then it became a car wash!

With my voice being a bit sacrificed this week, I am lucky the children know the routines so well and get along so swimmingly - it made it much easier!

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!