Bear Stays up for Christmas

This week we read one of our favorite books and had some help with visuals from 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. Here is a reading of the story:

We also had our very own lair in the playroom to go along with our story:

We had a great time with peppermint scented colored rice. The sensory bins had some changes throughout the week and the Chubby vehicles we opened for Christmas were a great addition as well.

We had time this week to decorate the tree and use Christmas items in our home center as well. We were inspired by our Santa mailbox to write our own letters to Santa.

Some of our table activities for the week included Montessori inspired transfer and opening activities.

Other activities included paper clip patterns and candy cane matching folder games:

 This week we also completed our gifts to parents and prepared for our Christmas open house. I was inspired by the pine cone painting activity found here.

Here are some activities that are available as fill-in activities whenever the children take them from the shelf. The pegs have also been used to build long "snakes."

I am currently working on new labels and containers for the playroom as well as a book nook inspired by a Pinterest post. Until my next post, I wish you a very merry Christmas and a promising New Year.

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies

I wanted to share some resources that I refer to when planning lessons. At BSU, I am continuously aligning state standards in my lesson plans. This same technique is used to align preschool indicators in the weekly themes. The focus in early childhood includes small and large muscle development, social development as well as emergent literacy and math/ science skills. I utilize the Creative Curriculum developmental continuum in order to meet these goals as well as a balance of activities to learn letter and number concepts. I also look at ideas from Montessori programs to provide self-correcting activities, literacy ideas and activities that assist in developing real-life skills. My goal is to provide activities that address the needs of all of our learning styles and meet the needs of whole child instruction.

This week, we focused our activities around If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond. I decided to work around the ideas in the book, which included popcorn, a movie theater, snow and Christmas decorations. Here are some of the activities from the week:

We had a great time measuring and pouring popcorn into the popcorn containers. We also popped the popcorn in an air popper without the lid on to watch the popcorn not only pop but also to count the kernels that fell within our circles on the mat.

I also created a movie theater space in our playroom complete with empty candy boxes, popcorn containers, tickets and money.

For our literacy work, we used items from the book to make our own story as well as the word cards found here.

For math, we counted popcorn, created patterns from our Christmas erasers and matched the number with these printables found here. I also used the candy canes to create a matching folder game and we also made patterns with printable cards and paper clips.

Our science and sensory experiences included new discovery bottles with Christmas ribbon or glitter items, Christmas sensory bins and cloud dough.

Art experiences also included sensory as well as we painted with bows and added food colors to shaving cream to create a marbleized effect on our trees.

The children really seemed to enjoy this theme and the imaginary play extended into other activities. We also worked on the songs we are preparing for our Christmas open house on Thursday, December 20 at 4p.m.

I will leave you with a fun video from the Wiggles that we used with our theme this week.

Ending Our Look at "The Mitten"

We had quite a few fun art, science, math and other activities that completed our week. Activities this week that were not photographed included using a plastic glove and a doubled up plastic glove with Crisco to explore cold water. This led to a discussion about fat in animals and how it helps squirrels and rabbits stay warm in the winter. I also did not capture the Ziploc bags filled with shaving cream. This offers sensory exploration for toddlers as well as providing a new medium to write our letters and numbers with our fingers.

Here are some pictures of the tin foil transfer art we completed this week. The children painted on the foil first and then placed their mitten shape on top to capture the print.

We also completed an easel painting with red and green this week.

Our math activities included guessing how many mitten shapes would fit across the item we measured. Our top guess was 10 and it took 11 mitten shapes to measure the coffee table.

We also worked on patterns with our bear family pattern cards and muffin tin pattern activity.

Our letter Mm activities included our Playdough mats made with sheet protectors to easily change the print out inside. We used Bendaroos to complete the letter.

We also had the opportunity to make our very own mitten cookies using green frosting and sprinkles. I had misplaced my mitten cookie cutter, so we improvised by cutting around a mitten shape on the rolled out dough.

Please check back with us next week as we explore creating a movie theater, popcorn and more with "If You Take a Mouse to the Movies."

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.