January week 1

January 7 - Winter

After two weeks of no preschool, I was so excited to have my students come back. My excitement was nothing compared to the enthusiasm of my students. They wanted to talk to me at the same time. They had two weeks worth of stories to tell me. They were so cute about wanting to show me all the homework that they accomplished. I have the best students in the world!! ;~}

We started our winter theme by learning a cute little finger play about a snowman and a bunny. The finger play was found at www.brighthubeducation.com I added the pictures to help my students read the poem by them selves when they read it in our class "Song book".
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We read the story "The Biggest Snowman Ever" book by Steven Kroll and talked about how working together helped Clayton and Desmond win the prize for the biggest snowman. To practice working together, we made out own snowman using a snowman window cling I had. 

Learning to work together took some "I want ..." but "I want ...". Eventually the girls worked together to create 

this master piece of a snowman. The body ended up on top of the head and the face was just hanging in the air above the snowman. The important thing is that she (the snowman) has a bow on top of her face.

In math we are working on making tally marks and charting our data. So we worked really hard to look at our pictures and gather data. 

After all the hard work, we had some free play before snack time. We had an impromptu music video session. The girls were pretending to be rock stars and performing songs for the class and I was able to video tape their songs so that I can share them with their families. 

All of this mental and physical work, we had worked up quite an appetite. We had a snowman string cheese, animal crackers, milk, and a melted snowman in a bowl (Vegetables in ranch dressing) idea came from pinteret.com/pin/227642956136194226/. The girls were really happy that I had put the snowmen in bowls so that they didn't melt all over the refrigerator. That was some really good thinking!

We tried our hand at a new art medium - Snow Painting. It took some real concentration and muscles to get the spray bottles to paint the snow. Here are some of the first attempts.

They were getting a bit frustrated trying to work the spray bottles and create a design, so I helped out and gave them an object to decorate: 

With the simple heart frame to work in they decorated it and felt a sense of accomplishment. I had spray bottles that you needed to push down like a hair spray bottle and the girls struggled with pushing the pump. I am thinking that spray bottles that have a trigger pump will be easier. Next trip to the dollar store I will be looking for trigger spray bottles. The bottles I had did not work well with mittens on and I am thinking that trigger spray bottles will be easier to use with mittens so we can keep our hands warm while we paint.

With very little time left we worked on measuring snowman with Unifix cubes. This was our first experience of measuring with Unifix cubes. Pictures will be posted with Thursday's blog. I got so involved in helping them figure out how to measure the snowmen's height that I forgot to take pictures.

Homework was to make a turkey salad (using half of a canned pear as the body that has been laid on a leaf of lettuce. the eyes are Craisins, the beak is an almond, feet are carrot sticks). A letter t craft, a "T" worksheet (both from my files), and an abc dot-to-dot picture (from ABCTeach.com). 

January 9 - How animals prepare for winter

Before class I has set up a card table and covered it with a white sheet to be used for our hibernation cave. There was a lot of interest in this new addition to the classroom when the students arrived. We learned the meaning of hibernation through a son I found on http://libraryonwheels.blogspot.com/2013/12/animals-in-winter.html. We learned the just the chorus as the introduction. We chatted for a few minutes about the difference between nightly sleeping and hibernation. With a better understanding of what hibernation is all about we moved over to the hibernation cave and took a look inside.

We found a surprise box full of animals. Inside the box be found about 20 Beanie Baby animals. We pulled each one out and identified the animal and where it lives. To help us determine which of our animals hibernate we read the book "Time to Sleep" by Denise Fleming. 

As we read we found each of the animals mentioned in the book. Every time the word winter or leaves was read in the book, a handful of silk leaves would be blown into our cave. 

One of the students noticed that the bear curled up into a ball to sleep. Taking that as a clue I remembered something that I had read and we did a quick impromptu science experiment. We took two hand towels and put them in the dryer for a few minutes, while we moved the non hibernating animals to the play area and covered the hibernating animals with the leaves. The towels were both warm, the first towel we laid out flat on the dryer and the second one we rolled up into a tight roll. After getting ready for snack, we checked on our towels and discovered that the flat towel was cool and the rolled towel was cool on the outside but still warm as we wiggled our fingers into the rolls.

For snack we made graham cracker caves for our animal cracker bear and mini Teddy Graham baby bear. There was yogurt snow, a celery stalk tree on the side of the cave, orange slice for the sun, celery and peanut butter logs with Craisin lady bugs on top, and a pistachio nut for a turtle. This is what my example looked like.

This is what the bear caves really looked like. They were just as tasty. I love looking at the pictures on Pinterest where they show what it looked like on Pinterest and how their attempt looked. Well the girls almost nailed it.  :~}

After snack, the students had lots of energy. We tried our hand at snow painting again, this time we had bottles with a trigger pump and it was a lot easier to paint.

The best part of the painting was being able to stomp through it when finished. Poor little gingerbread man, our feet got it not the fox.

Once the tromping got started, it couldn't be contained. We had to tromp some designs into the snow.

We had just a few minutes before moms would arrive, so we did a quick science project. I made bowls of ice water and we let our little animal fingers play in the water. After a couple of minutes our little fingers were freezing cold. I asked how animals, like penguins and Arctic bears, could be in the freezing cold water all the time. We thought the bears stayed warm because they had fur coats and the penguins had feathers. I suggested that we slather some lard on one finger and dip it back in the frigid water and see what happened. To our surprise the lard kept the covered part of our fingers warm. We briefly talked about how the animals eat a lot of food while they are awake and store the food as blubber (like the groundhog did in the book "Time to Sleep"). We will continue to talk about how animals hibernate and stay alive.

Homework was to make a hibernation booklet (found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Hibernation-Foldable-Reader-FREEBIE-Super-easy-to-use-For-K-1-396700), hibernating puppets (from Scholastic teaching resource), and a hibernation coloring page from my files.