Valentine's Day

Love has definitely been in the air in our classroom! This was our second week of love and we spent most of it learning all about the holiday that celebrates it, Valentine’s Day!

We started our week off in the kitchen! We made red sugar cookies! The munchkins honed in on their cooking skills, fine motor skills and patience while we mixed the ingredients together and waited for the cookies to bake.

They were worth it! So very yummy J

We made a fun art project and created our own fluffy paint! I combined shaving cream and white glue, plus a little water color to add a pop of color, and voila! The munchkins loved the foamy paint!

 

After painting 4 hearts each, and letting them dry of course, the munchkins worked on their fine motor, hand-eye coordination and persistence skills and laced the hearts together. I hung them from the ceiling. So festive!!

 

The next day we read a special book about making valentines. After reviewing the shape of love and valentines we were able to look at the back of the book and identify different colors and shapes hidden on the book. It was a great opportunity to help increase our comprehension and reviewed our shapes and colors!

 

BLOOPER ALERT: For art we had a bit of a blooper activity. They all happen every now and then J We were making our valentine’s bags and had tons of fun painting them. I had cut the top in the shape of a heart but miss-planned. The bag’s paint dried and closed all of the openings. It was a great idea and, with a couple of tweaks, we will try this again next year.

 

Our next trial-run for our Valentine’s collectors were made from small pink and red mailboxes that I picked up from Target. I found some special stickers and the munchkins decorated their mailboxes with the stickers. Stickers are tricky for our age-group so this was a fun, yet challenging task. The end result was a bunch of beautiful treat collectors!!

We talked about the terms Sink and Float today too! I gathered some pink and red items that would float and sink and we had fun watching them react in the water. After a few items, the munchkins had fun predicting the last few objects. We will continue to revisit this concept to help us understand these concepts more. It was tons of fun!!

 

Valentine’s Day couldn’t come quicker! We celebrated all day long! One of the first activities we did was Conversation Heart Math!! Candies and math are the best combination!

First we each took a handful and added it to our graph. We got comfortable with our classification-by-color skills with this activity.

 

We each got a turn to separate the candies on our own with the following activity. Each of my munchkins got a handful of candies and practiced their listening and classification skills. They did a great job with this and we celebrated by eating a candy at the end!!

Next we each handed out valentines! That was too much fun! I was so proud of the munchkins and how polite they all were! Every time a valentine was handed out, we practiced saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and every recipient said, “Thank You!” Yay Munchkins!

We ended our day doing what we love most! We played with babies!!!! What did you do?

 

Check back for our week exploring the rest of our emotions! Silly, sad, mad, excited, scared… It will all be explored!

Community Helpers, Week 2!

We spent two awesomely fun-filled weeks learning all about the Community Helpers around town and discussed what kinds of jobs we may want to have when we grow up…

Here is a peek at our second week of study:

We began our second week off with a study on the different branches of the military. We live in San Diego and have all three branches: the Army, Navy and Marines fairly close. Some of us have mommies and daddies or other family and neighbors that are in the military so this was a great group to study! After reading a great Navy Book a parent brought in, we talked about the meaning of the word “Camouflage” and made a fun camouflage art project!

We love our Peek-A-Boo Counting!! This week our theme was a police badge! Super fun! All of the children love to count aloud and pay attention to the numerals so they can find the hiding “peek-a-boo” badge! They are all such great counters because of this activity. When we begin our study of numeral recognition, I know that they will be able to pick it up quickly because of this activity too! It’s so fun and educational!

 

 

Our next day of study was all about doctors! We have a great community helper puzzle set so at Circle Time we worked together to put a doctor puzzle together. We talked about the trick of beginning on the corners and sides and how to find them.

For art we made a doctor's hat. I wrote the children’s names on the head band (ex: Doctor Vivienne) and they decorated it with dot-art paint. Afterwards, they worked their fine motor skills and wrapped tin foil around a pre-cut cardboard circle.

 

 

I affixed it all together and they all had a chance to be little doctors for the day!

 

After talking about doctors for people, we talked about animal doctors- Veterinarians! I had all the children bring in their own stuffed animal to fix-up. At circle time, after showing them how, I gave them each some gauze to wrap up a boo-boo on their animal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For science, we took our white gauze and red and blue tinted water. After we put some gauze in the red and blue we mixed the waters together and made purple! We had three different colored gauze groups!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the gauze dried the children got to create art with it and made some very different sculptures, mounds and designs! Lots of creativity at work!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To help produce stronger fine motor skills we got to “feed” a horse by scooping apples and a doggie by picking up bones with tweezers. These are great activities from the Lakeshore Company.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following day we talked all about Mail Carriers! We had a lot of fun learning about mail boxes and how the mail system works, then created our own special “giant” stamp.

I asked each child’s parent to secretly write their children a special letter and place it in an envelope. I told the children that the Mailman came to see us and delivered special letters just for them! I gave them their letters and they were so excited!

After they opened their letters, working on their fine motor skills, I read each of them their letters. They requested to hear it twice and would have continued to have me reread their letters if we had time. It was very special for them!

It was also a great experience for them to see how letters make up messages that contain meaning!

 

Afterwards, we made special art, stuffed our own envelopes and decorated our envelopes. We delivered mail back to our parents!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our last special Community Helper of focus was a Painter. We talked about all the different places a Painter can be hired to paint and had fun dressing up during circle Time!! We then had a blast painting throughout our classroom. Every inch was theirs to paint!!

 

For art I covered a big area and then let the children pretend they were actually painting the wall. They each made “Mini Masterpieces," and they enjoyed it a lot!! Who knew that painting vertically could be so fun!

I hope you enjoyed our Community Helper Unit as much as we did!! Check back for our Month of Love and Other Emotions for February!!