Fun with "The Mitten"

This is the place where I will share some of the activities we have experienced during the week as well as recipes that your children have asked me to share. This site will be updated weekly and will hopefully give you a window into our week. Since returning to school, I have learned that constructivism, play- based instruction and movement are a large part of successful learning. Instead of looking at a flash card with the letter B on it, we draw a letter B in salt after exploring a sand paper, card stock or wooden B. Play dough mats are also used as we learn the letter and Play dough or Bendaroos are used, as they will be for the letter Mm this week. Opportunities to work on social skills are also practiced during free-play time.

Early literacy is vital to child development and quality books will be used to create our weekly themes. We start each book with a picture walk, which can look like the one here:

As we explore the book for our theme, we will also learn vocabulary and sequencing from the book. For The Mitten by Jan Brett, we are using the masks and story aids to recreate and extend the story. We will also use the characters to create a new story. Here are the activities used during table time:

We have used the masks to be the character, place the animals in a blanket "mitten," place the story in order and tried to fit our bodies inside a small covered area. We discovered that the animals would probably not fit inside the mitten!

Some of our math and extension activities include finding out how many bear counters fit inside the mitten or on the card stock mittens. One of our mathematicians found that 21 bear counters fit inside our mitten. We have been using the shapes with animals from the story as well as using our senses to explore shaving cream "snow" with animals.

We have also been exploring colors through sorting and matching, learning our songs for our upcoming program and making a "countdown to Christmas" Santa project. We have also been learning about the real animals from the mitten:

Tomorrow, we will be making mitten shaped cookies to go along with our stories that we will create. I will share some of those stories in a future post.