Winter Fun!

We have spent the last few weeks learning about winter and polar animals. 

 

 

We read the book, The Hat, by Jan Brett (Miss Katie's favorite author!) and then decorated hats to make them "fancy".

We've been working really hard on mastering our uppercase letters.  Students played snowball bingo by covering letters on their snowflakes with cotton balls.

We enjoyed playing with "Floam" one day!  Fun sensory experience :)

To go along with our study of The Hat, we made a hedgehog snack using donut holes, chocolate frosting, and chocolate sprinkles.  It was a yummy success!

Eating them was the best part!

Some of the students discovered our magnets last week.  They've been busy experimenting to see which things in our classroom are magnetic.  The garbage can is certainly magnetic!  

We read another Jan Brett book, The Mitten, and then laced a mitten together and cut out and colored characters from the book to put inside.  Hopefully your child used their mitten to tell you the story!

We made mitten sun catchers for our window by placing tissue paper squares on contact paper.  

Finally, we experimented with ice, salt, and food coloring.  First we tried melting ice with plain water, and then we tried it with salt water.  The salt water melted the ice faster!  We also used red, yellow, and blue water and watched the colors mix together.  It was pretty exciting making orange, green and purple!

We've now finished up our winter unit and are learning about the rainforest.  We are inviting students to bring in an item that reminds them of the rainforest on Friday to share with the class.  Ideas might be a stuffed animal from  the rainforest (monkey, parrot, etc.), a food that grows in the tropics (pineapple, mango, etc.), 

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!  I've been waiting to post pictures until I had our Christmas Party pictures to post....and today during the party I forgot to take pictures.  So, without further ado.......

 

 Everyone looked so handsome at the Christmas Program!  What a great job all of the kiddos did singing their hearts out!
 

Before break, we worked on many festive arts and crafts projects.  For this project, students had to put seven strips of paper in order from longest to shortest to make a Christmas tree.  Students were then able to decorated their trees with sequins and spangles.

Students worked on matching patterns using unifix boards and cubes.  It's so neat to see the finished product!

We made stockings for Santa!  First, students had to cut out their stocking, then lace a piece of yarn around the outside.  Students then glued cotton balls to the top of the stocking and used glue and glitter to make their names.  

This week, we practiced our cutting and gluing skills by cutting out hats to glue on snowflakes.  We've also been encouraging students to color in the lines - go slow and don't scribble! 

 We worked in our Handwriting without Tears books on Thursday and practiced tracing big and little lines.  Next week we will start working on proper letter formation beginning with the letter "L". 

We also had some sensory fun on Thursday!  Children were able to experience shaving cream on the table.  Students practiced making shapes, letters, and writing their names in the shaving cream.  It was so much fun!

We also really enjoyed our party on Friday!  We opened all of our gifts - thank you to all of the families that gave gifts to our classroom and to Miss Briann and myself.  We are grateful for everything!  We watched the movie "Cars" in our jammies and then returned to the classroom to have some delicious treats.  Thanks again to the families that brought treats and supplies for the party.  Everyone had a great time!

Next week we will continue to talk about winter and will focus our attention on the story The Mitten by Jan Brett.  We will also start to really focus on letter recognition and writing our names correctly.  Kindergarten is coming!