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.