Sunday, April 27, 2014

Earth Week!


Unless Someone Cares an Awful Lot, Nothing is Going to Change. It’s Not!” –The Lorax, Dr. Seuss

We learned all about how we can help save our earth this week!

First we talked about where we live and traced it from Carlsbad to San Diego… all the way to the Earth. We also talked about how we live on the land and how there is the water as well.

We made earth cakes from green and blue batter. It was a lot of yummy fun!











We used eye droppers to paint with and created one-of-a-kind earths! This was a fun fine-motor activity.



We also checked on the grass we planted last week! Wow! It grew fast!! We took care of it by watering the plants and then put them back in the window to catch some sunlight.

My munchkins learned about recycling and had fun separating recyclables by plastic and paper. We learned that these can be taken to a special place and melted down to be reused.


We made some yummy earth pudding in Kids Kitchen on Tuesday! After making two separate batched in blue and green, we put them together and enjoyed!



In the classroom we reused toilet paper rolls and practiced our letter recognition skills and fine motor skills. My munchkins placed stickers with uppercase letters on top of the lowercase letters written on the rolls.

One Wednesday we tore paper in both blue and green and made earths.


We also practiced our tracing and letter recognition skills of our letter of the week, the letter E!


My little ones have been getting really into puzzles and worked in teams to put together 24 piece puzzles. It was so fun to hear how they worked together!



In the afternoon we came up with objects that reminded us of the earth and worked hard to spell out each of the words.


On Thursday we colored Earth Day coloring sheets, working on keeping our coloring within the lines.



We made earths with our very own hand prints!!


We also got to celebrate Ryder’s third birthday!!!


I asked my munchkins what they would plant to help make the earth beautiful and this is what they said….


On Friday we played in the Sand Box on the Big Kid Playground!!!!






We also used watercolors to paint an earth, focusing on staying within the lines and identifying the difference in the blue water and the green land.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

My Oh My, A Butterfly!

Caterpillars and Butterflies!

Butterflies are majestic bugs and we just love them!!

We learned about the life cycle of a butterfly this week!
  
We got to match up different bugs and get familiar with the names of different bugs.

We also practiced putting numbers 1-9 in order, in order to complete a puzzle that unveiled a different bug.

For art we made beautiful watercolor butterflies!!

In Kids Kitchen we used both red and green grapes to create a caterpillar. I encouraged my munchkins to use a pattern if they wanted and to get creative J They had great caterpillars and, before eating them, I encouraged them to count out how many grapes they each used.

We had a fun fine motor experience with bug stamping…

We also build caterpillars out of different colorful pompoms…

We’ve also been working very hard on gaining more control with our fine motor skills. Check out these caterpillar lines!!

We had fun acting out the life cycle of a butterfly on our Science Deck.
Starting as an egg…

Hatching and being a very hungry, tiny little caterpillar… and eating and Eating until…

We are big enough and it is time to spin a chrysalis around ourselves, where we wait for two weeks!!

And emerge as a BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY!


We made caterpillars out of our names, and my munchkins challenged themselves by attempting to put their letters in the correct order. Great work!




We have been working on our rhyming skills and had fun rhyming with the word “bug.” Check out the real and make-believe words we came up with!!

Butterflies sip nectar through their tongues, which are shaped like straws. Here, we sipped on sugar water/nectar, just like a butterfly!!



We also practiced our cutting skills, cutting a straight line, and stopping at the butterfly.


To complete the week we made smoosh butterflies! Aren’t they pretty!!