Pumpkins Week Two!

We continued to do some pumpkin activities last week and also added in some Fire Safety talk! We learned about smoke detectors and stop, drop, and roll. For our friends that come to school on Fridays, we got to go outside and visit the fire truck!

Check out the pictures below to see some of the things we did last week!

Checking out the insides of a pumpkin with magnifying glass.

Playing with the fire trucks.

Creating a fire station and a house to put the fire out on!

Black and Orange noodles and small plastic pumpkins in our sensory table.

Making a Fire Truck Snack

We used graham crackers, icing, pretzels, chex cereal, & honey comb.

Visiting with the Ellendale Vol. Fire Dept.

Listening with a Kindergarten Class

Checking them out in their suits. The stuff they wear weighs 80lbs!!

Sitting in the ambulance

Listening to Fireman Corey.

Checking out what's on the truck!

This week we will be talking about Pets! Be on the lookout for our Monthly Newsletter coming home this week and remember these important dates!!

FRIDAY November 11, 2011: NO SCHOOL

WEDNESDAY November 23, 2011: NO SCHOOL

THURSDAY November 24, 2011: NO SCHOOL

FRIDAY November 25, 2011: NO SCHOOL

Let's Talk Pumpkins!

Sorry for not updating last week. It was a short school week with only 3 days for the students. We continued/wrapped up our activities with apples and moved on to pumpkins this week.

House Area: pumpkin patch
Block Area: blocks, cars, gears
Toy Area: Counting cards, matching games, puzzle cards, snap blocks
Writing Area: Making jack-o-latern faces/writing on pumpkins, practicing the letter P
Art Area: brown bag pumpkins, painting pumpkins, play doh
Sensory Table: sand with small plastic pumpkins

We also looked inside of a pumpkin at small group time, practiced counting skills, and learned how a pumpkin grows!

We will be continuing to talk about pumpkins this week with some added Fire trucks and fire prevention activities as well. Fire prevention week was earlier this month, but a fire truck is coming to visit us on Friday! We will talk about the importance of stop, drop, and roll. Make sure your child knows what to do if there is ever a fire at home!

Apples Week #1

So I really dropped the ball on classroom pics this week, despite having my camera sitting out everyday! I was able to capture a photo of some excellent imaginative building going on in the block area though. I was informed it was a "Race" for cars.

 

Looks like a pretty tricky race to me! :)

Some train building...

And making our tissue paper apples!

I also snapped some photos of our finished work. This week we made apples using a lowercase letter 'a', made apple prints with apples in paint, and taste tested apples to pick our favorite one!

(Sorry if I just made you turn your head sideways to check out that last one!! :) )

Here is our word wall filled with all of our 'A' pictures! Thank you all so much for sending in pictures for us to use!

Hopefully you've had the chance to work on the apple glyph project that was sent home! I can't wait to see them come back in! I love seeing work completed at home! :)

This week we will be doing some more apple activities such as reading "The Apple Pie Tree" and sequencing the events in the story.

Just a reminder, there is NO SCHOOL on Thursday Oct. 13th and Friday Oct. 14th! Have a great week!

Pete the Cat

This week we did several activities with the book Pete the Cat: I love my White Shoes. Everyone was so into the book and remembered it's predictable text right away! This would be a great book to add to your home collection!

The first time we read the book, we matched up cards of various things Pete either stepped in in the book, or could possibly step in, and what  color it would turn his shoes. This is great practice for predicting and thinking skills!

The next time we met with Pete, we made our own Pete the Cat pictures and colored his shoes our favorite colors! All of the shapes we needed for Pete were already cut out for us, but we had to wait and follow the step by step directions to put Pete together. All the students impressed me! They did a great job!

This week we will be talking about Apples! I can't wait! Apples are one of my favorite themes! A few things to be on the lookout for in your child's folder this week:

- individual school photo order forms
- apple glyph project to do at home and send back to school
- September/October newsletter

Colors Week #1

We are having so much fun with our colors! Color week #1 was a lot of fun, and I cannot wait for color week #2! I have even more great activities planned for the kiddos!

Here we are making our Orange color book this week!

We also made color books for the colors Red and Yellow. Students drew their own pictures, or cut pictures of that color out of magazines. This was a great way for us to practice our cutting skills!

This week we will continue our color days. Again, if you choose, you can send your child to school wearing the color of the day! :)

Monday: Green

Tuesday: Green

Wednesday: Blue

Thursday: Blue

Friday: Purple

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

This week we talked about school buses and did several activities around the book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems! You should definitely check this book out, all of the students loved it! :)

We practiced the letter B, and the sound that letter B makes. We made hand print pigeons from the book and our own school buses. (More pictures of those to follow--Miss Blecki forgot to take pictures while we made them, but will post a picture of the completed buses!)

Here we are making our hand print pigeons!

And here we are having some fun at our centers! We will have some new toys and games in our centers for the next two weeks while we talk about our colors! I can't wait for the students to see what is in our sensory table! :)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend! Don't forget about sending your child to school wearing something in the color we are talking about for that day (if you choose!) As a reminder, here are the colors we are doing, on which days:

Monday: red

Tuesday: red

Wednesday: orange

Thursday: orange

Friday: yellow