The letter Bb and Fall

    Books from these past two weeks included Best House Ever by Richard Scarry, The Grand and Wonderful Day, The Leaves are Falling One by One and Bear's Busy Family. We explored colors with I am a Rainbow. New books were added to our book area with the letter Bb in the title. For our movement activities, we danced to Veggie Tale silly songs and favorites from The Learning Station. We also tossed balloons with paper plates and threw sock balls in clothes baskets (not pictured).

    Some of our sensory activities included working with play dough, Rice Krispies, dominoes and buckets in the sensory table and boats. We also explored gourds in the sensory table and on the light table with our blue fish. We also explored with boxes and the scale with the gourds but I was unable to get a picture.

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

     We enjoyed transferring gems, building boxes from blocks and using buckets on the light table.

 

 

 

 

     Art and craft activities included rainbow squish art to go along with the Dolly Parton book, exploring the letter Bb and then balloon painting with the balloons, bubble wrap printing and letter stamping.

 

 

 

 

 

   We had the opportunity to explore John Chapman's life (Johnny Appleseed) and made our own applesauce. We also made an apple craft to go along with the story after exploring the seeds within the apples.

 

 

 

     Our final project included some small pumpkins that were donated by a family. We used the pumpkins to mix red and yellow paint for orange.

 

 

   Our next theme will include the letter Cc along with community helpers. We will also continue our look at fall as we explore spiders and bats. Happy Fall!







Folk Music and St. Patrick's Day

This week we took time to explore Folk Music along with St. Patrick's Day celebrations. We started the week with the book St. Patrick's Day in the Morning by Eve Bunting. We explored Irish music with selections from The Gathering 2013: 25 Classic Irish Songs and Ballads and The Very Best of the Irish Tenors 1999-2002. We spent time this week with The Peter Yarrow Songbook: Let's Sing Together! We also watched the following selection from Riverdance and worked on dancing our own jig:

For our music activities, we used our instruments as well as our ribbon dancers. These were inspired by this site and were made with Mason jar rings and leftover Christmas ribbon. I had a couple of my girls try them out as crowns this week as well.

Our table activities included a rainbow number tracing activity found here, a gem transfer activity with a worksheet from this site, our bead pattern stacking toy, a tweezer activity with pom-poms and color matching with our folder game from last week.

Our craft activities and art activities were varied this week. We glued a rainbow of dots on a shamrock shape. We also printed shamrocks with bell peppers as found here. We took time to make rainbow crayons as inspired by Confessions of a Homeschooler. One of our favorite activities included coloring the outside of a clear plastic cup and watching it melt down to a disc in the oven. We extended the activity by using our new discs on the light table as well.

We also took time to revisit an art process with shaving cream and green food coloring to marbleize shamrock shapes.

Some of our sensory table activities included sailing green ice boats and containers, finding treasure in the rainbow rice and in the split peas and beans.

Free play at the light table included our colored straws. color paddles and gems.

Some of the highlights of the week included a balloon race inspired by this site, making a rainstick  out of paper towel tubes, tooth picks, duck tape and foam stickers along with cleaning pennies with a vinegar/ salt combination along with ketchup. We also used a graph from this site with Lucky Charms.

We also had a surprise visit from a trickster this week.

Join us next week as we explore Spring. Until then, have a great week!