Happy Groundhog Day!!
Today was another day of celebration. Last Thursday we celebrated Chinese New Year (as a reminder we reviewed our Chinese numbers, 1-10) and today we will celebrate Groundhog's Day by learning about why we celebrate it and why it is important. We talked about how the tradition started in Europe and was brought to the United States by the German immigrants to Pennsylvania. Of course we had to find Germany and Pennsylvania on our meeting rug. The students were especially interested to learn that our son Jeff was born in Germany. I like to share little facts to make our learning more personal.
Math was a bit challenging at first, we used toothpicks to help us count the sides of 6 different shapes. We recorded our results in our Math Journals. It was difficult because I had not explained our purpose as clearly as I had thought. The students thought that we needed to cover the whole side of the shape with a toothpick, and they wanted to break toothpicks into smaller pieces to cover the lines completely. As soon as I explained that they only were using the toothpicks to count the sides and not measure them, the activity went very smoothly. As they were finishing up one student noticed that the circle had been forgotten. We had a quick lesson (where I asked leading questions to help her figure out) that a circle has no straight sides to be counted.
There was a lot of hard brain work done in learning about Groundhog's Day and the number of sides to shapes and we were ready for a snack. We tore apart some chocolate cookies,
We crushed the cookies until they looked like fine dirt (we used the food processor to make quick work of it).
To make our own Gobbler's Knob we put chocolate pudding into our dessert dish (Phil's tree), sprinkled dirt (cookie crumbs) on top, added an animal cracker (Phil), and sprinkled the frosting around the plate for snow (along with some Honeycomb cereal for falling snowflakes) to complete the scene. We also added some carrot sticks for Phil, but we were so hungry that we ate the carrots too. This was a messy snack but very enjoyable. We drank milk to wash down our snack.
We have had an Arctic chill in the area and the weather was a frigid -1 degrees, so we stayed inside. We used our stretchy bands and started out making different geometric shapes,
and ended by dancing to some classic rock and roll on the radio.
To keep using the energy we had built up, we made a cute little groundhog pop-up puppet, idea came from http://kiboomukidssongs.com/groundhog-paper-plate-craft/. We folded the paper plate in half, cut out a small hole in the center for the straw, colored the plate brown with white snow on top, cut out the groundhog out of brown paper, glued it to a straw, and added the words to a song on the front of the paper plate.
We put or craft together and watched a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CVqzpqBJx0 (the song starts at 50, but has a cute intro) and learned the song as we played with our puppet. The song is very short and easy to learn.
To finish off the day we used our letter tiles and made words. We are working hard to match the Capital letters on the tiles to the lower case letters on our picture cards. We are learning to use the alphabet line on the wall to figure out which letters go together.
Homework was a dot to dot Groundhog picture from preschoolalphabet.blogspot.com/2012/01/groundhogs-day-fun.html, "Was Punxsutawney Phil's Prediction correct?" chart (they are to chart the temperature and weather for the next six weeks), and a Shadow Moves activity found at http://www.preschool-plan-it.com/ground-hog-day.html#ScienceActivities under Music and movement.
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