January 3rd Week

January 21 - Bears

Our morning always start with the students doing a floor puzzle or an individual puzzle as we wait for everyone to arrive and get ready for the day. This morning the students noticed that some new things had been added to our classroom. [Four day weekends are great for working on special projects.] The students were looking around while we were trying to have our morning meeting.

I took advantage of their interest and we got our binoculars and played a quick game of "I Spy with my little eyes."

We spied the five different bear pictures around the room, new work stations, and even checked in on our hibernating animals in their den.

After finding some interesting things around the room we needed to focus by reading/retelling "The Three Bears" by  F. Rojankovsky, a Little Golden Book. We talked about size, used our voices to dramatize the different bears, and practiced retelling the story with our eyes closed. Nothing like a little imagination for setting the mood.

To learn about some unique bears we used "My Itsy Bitsy Bear Book" from http://www.kidzone.ws/lw/bears/ws7.htm as our guide. We did our best imitation of a bear walk and found the picture of a panda bear. We learned a how tall panda bears are, what they like to eat, how much they weigh, and the legend of the panda, http://pandajaan.tripod.com/Panda%20Story.htm. It is a cute story especially for little girls. We checked our guide books and bear walked over to the Sun bear. Here we learned that black Sun bears got their name from the orange 'rising sun' on their chest and they make their nests in tree branches that they have pulled down to the ground. Crawling on we learned about America's black and brown bears. We ran and took a quick peek to make sure our own black and brown bears were still hibernating, they were. Lastly we learned about the Asiatic bear. They make their nests in trees and they are black with a cream colored V/Y shape on their chest. To wrap up our lesson we went back to our world rug and talked about where the bears live. We discovered that the most uniquely colored bears live in Asia.

For our snack we talked about how hungry our hibernating bears would be when they woke up. So we each got an animal cracker bear (a mama bear who had given birth to two baby bears), four fish six honey comb cereals, and ten Craisins (for the berries). We also got a daddy bear who ate the same as the mama bear, 4 fish, 6 honeycombs, and 10 berries.

We are pretty sure that after hibernating for such a long time they bears would be ready to do some stretching. To help us get stretched out we played the game Dr. Seuss Super Stretchy ABC. It is like 'Twister' but incorporating the ABC's. We found it difficult to get each hand and foot on different letters and then get our ear on another letter, all at the same time. There were lots of giggles when the teacher tried. :~}

We started a new book "Three Pigs, One Wolf, and Seven Magic Shapes" and then practiced our math skills as we made objects with Tangrams. We read the first page and made a duck and a cat. This was a new activity and it took us some time to get it just right.

For Language Arts we learned a new sight word 'the' by singing "The T-H-E Song" tune 'Farmer in the Dell.' We started to do our lesson on the letter Ff, but we had been doing so many focused learning activities that our brains just needed time to process and store the things we learned.

So we voted on what activity would interest them and they decided to chill out and look at some of their favorite books. We pulled out the bean bags and chilled out with some great books.

Homework was to color the Three Bears worksheet and retell the story to their families.

January 16 - Animals in Winter

We started off the morning a little differently. The students right away noticed their Snowmen chart and the bags of marshmallows that we were using to measure the height of the snowmen. Of course, marshmallows, even stale hard ones, are enticing to children. We worked on measuring our snowmen and occasionally had a marshmallow jump out of our hands and into our mouths. About 15 minutes, the girls started to get fidgety and lose interest in measuring and had more interest in eating the marshmallows. So we concluded the  activity and moved onto our usual morning routine.

We read "The Magical Snowman" by Catherine Walters. It is a wonderful story that sparks imagination in children. We had a quick discussion about why dad didn't really believe little bunny and we decided it was because little bunny was using his imagination.

We moved on to making our own magical snowman, in the form of an exciting science project. We made snowmen out of baking soda play dough. It took 1 c. baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, and about 4 Tbs. of warm water (just enough to make a sturdy dough). I can't find the source of the recipe, but I will look for it and give credit when I find it.

In the true spirit of being a scientist one of the students decided to taste the play dough. We had talked about what the ingredients were in the dough and that it was edible, but would not be very tasty. She tried a bite and this was her reaction. We rinsed the taste out with water and continued our experiment.

After making our snowmen, I presented 2 different spray bottles of clear liquid, water and vinegar. We followed the Scientific Method and started with the question: What will happen to the snowman when I spray the clear liquid #1 onto it? We hypothesized that the snowman might melt like when an outside snowman gets rained on. We conducted the experiment, we struggled while we worked on strengthening our fingers, and we pushed down the pump and sprayed the first clear liquid on our snowmen. It took quite a few sprays before the clear liquid had any affect on our snowmen. We recorded our results by talking about them. Finally we concluded that with enough clear liquid our snowman would melt and our hypothesis was correct.

Our second experiment started when I presented the second spray bottle, clear liquid #2, and asked the same question. With the question asked we formed a hypothesis. We decided that clear liquid #2 would have the same affect on our snowman. We conducted the experiment and sprayed the second liquid on the snowmen. At first the result was hardly visible, not enough liquid. The scientists were relentless and continued spraying and then it happened. The snowmen began to bubble and the more liquid #2 that was sprayed on the snowmen the more they bubbled. This was an unexpected and yet a delightful surprise. One of the scientists remembered making an erupting volcano with an older sibling and made the connection that the results were similar. One of the scientist asked if she could pour more liquid #2 on her snowman to see the result. So we poured the last couple of tablespoons of liquid #2 on our snowmen and they really started erupting and bubbling everywhere. We again discussed our results and concluded that our hypothesis was incorrect.

For our snack we took nuts, like the ones squirrels store for winter, and made our own nut butter. We used 1 C whole raw almonds, 2 Tbs. Canola oil, and a pinch of salt; and mixed them up in the blender. Blending the nuts didn't give us just the right texture so we added 2 more Tbs. Canola oil.
 

This made a rather thin almond butter but it was thick enough to spread on crackers and thin enough to use as a dip for our apple curls (made with an Apple peeler/corer/slicer from Pampered Chef). It was a delicious treat that we washed down with milk.

After all the fun experimenting in the kitchen we didn't have a lot of time to get dressed for the snow  outside, play for a while, and then get undressed and still have time to enjoy an activity before going home. So ... I decided to bring out my new Partner Parachute and let them play with it. It is so much easier for them to control than the 6' parachute.

They created new games to play with the parachute.

We finished the day with a quiet game of Snowman Bump. The dice seemed to want to roll away so we put them in a container to keep them close by the game.

Homework was doing a Static Electricity experiment, counting and tracing numbers with a nut theme, and sharing their almond butter with their family so they could report back on how many liked the almond butter. Here is a side way view of the recording sheet. The smiley face was for things that were attracted to the balloon's static electricity and the straight face was for those things that did not react to the static electricity.

January 2nd week

January 14 - Winter

We started the morning off with a couple of books.

"There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow!" by  Lucille Colandro and "Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner and Mark Buehner.

We also worked on out Hibernation Song, I found this song on several different websites. It is sung to the tune of "Aloutte." It is a really catchy tune and unfortunately I have been singing it in my sleep and waking up to it for the past several days.

 After our morning meeting we continued collecting data on our snowmen. Those who had not finished measuring all their snowmen with the Unifix cubes, finished up. As they finished measuring with the Unifix cubes we moved on to measure our snowmen with marshmallows.

As we measured we noticed that one snowman was 3 Unifix cubes tall and he was 5 marshmallows tall.

One student stood her marshmallows on the flat end and made a row to measure the height of the snowmen. The other student laid her marshmallows on their side, so the flat ends touched each other, in her measurements. We had a short discussion on who was right, in the end we concluded that both were right and laying out the marshmallows in different ways would give us different data.

For our group activity we went ice skating on the carpet, while listening to "A Skater's Waltz" found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8. Listening to nice soft music and trying to keep up with the rhythm helped keep emotions to a minimum. We got off to a rough start. We had a hard time remembering to keep our feet sliding on the floor, rather than walking normally. Once we got that worked out, we found that socks slipped on the wax paper and made it very difficult to skate. We took our socks off and thought that bare feet would work, it did but not very well. I had given them a full strip of wax paper to skate on and they kept having the wax paper run into things and would come out from under their feet. I cut the wax paper smaller, just bigger than their foot, and that helped. We still were having more frustration than fun, so I rolled up some packing tape and put it on the bottom of their foot and stuck their skate to the tape. Problems SOLVED!!! We were able to skate around the room with the greatest of ease. When we accidentally bumped into each other we learned that we had created static electricity! What a joy, accompanied with many silly giggles, that was to create static electricity and then shock each other.

 Snack time had become a time for fussing with each other over simple things. Last week we talked about things that would help make snack time more pleasant for everyone (mostly the teacher as they were oblivious to their whining). From their suggestions, I made a Snack Time schedule for us to follow. Today we followed it, even though we were not perfect at it, things went a lot smoother. (Sorry the picture is a bit fuzzy.) Everyone had a job and we worked together to get our snack ready.

For snack we made tortilla snowflakes, idea came from http://www.clubhousejr.com/recipes/sweet-snowflakes. We altered the recipe a bit, we didn't put it into the oven to bake, we just popped them into the microwave for 30 seconds. I would recommend that you put them on the wax paper as they stuck to the plate as they cooled. While the snowflakes cooled down we ate our orange segments and our cheese sticks. This tasty snack we washed down with some milk.

Because some of us were not dressed appropriately to play outside, we went bowling for snowmen. We had three chances to bowl down the stack of snowmen. Our bowling looked more like an arcade game where we threw the balls at the stack of snowmen to knock them down. After the first round we had a difficult time re-stacking the snowmen. They had attracted some of our static electricity from the carpet and the snowmen kept jumping off the stack to stick to our hands. Silly snowmen!!

Our last activities of the day was to work on our words and letters. There were two centers. Letter matching / spelling and sentencing posting.

 The first station that I introduced was the letter matching and word spelling. This station Polar Animal Spelling, is from http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2011/01/polar-lands.html. It was super simple to set up and the girls really liked that they were spelling words. A big kudos to the authors.

 The second center was making sentences on a word strip board. The hardest part was trying to get the word cards into the plastic on the word strip board. This activity came from http://thisreadingmama.com/2012/08/10/reading-the-alphabet-letter-tt/. She has some really great ideas for learning the alphabet. I chose this activity because it builds confidence as they are able to read the book on their own.

Word work can be hard work for our brains. Our ending brain break was a game called "Snowman Bump" found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Snowman-Stuff-Math-and-Literacy-Freebie-453700. It took a bit to understand the rules, but after a couple of rounds they understood the objective of the game. They wanted to stay and finish playing. That will happen on another day.

Homework - the students have three bits of homework. 1) They were to make and color a book called "Melting Snowman" from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/SnowmanMeltingEmergentReader.htm. 2) Do a snowman estimation paper, it is an outline of a snowman and they are to estimate how many cotton balls it will take to cover the snowman. Their guess/estimation should be written on the hat. Then they were to take cotton balls and glue them onto the snowman, count the cotton balls and see if their estimation was correct. 3) In my files I had a snowman dot-to-dot with capital letters, I changed them to lower case letters to help them recognize the lower case letters, they are are really good at recognizing capital letters.

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.