Easter Party

Happy Easter!

Rachel put together a GREAT Easter party for the little ones.  I invited myself to lend her an extra hand and was able to get some pictures of the fun....

First she read this adorable book, “One More Egg” by Sarah Emmanuelle Burg.  Sorry the pic is sideways.  All the kids loved the book.

After the book the kids made chickens.  They cut out the large circle themselves then we traced their hands, cut them out and had the kids glue them to the chickens for their hands and feet.  The kids also added a beak, feathers, and eyes.

Madeline came as the Easter Bunny and gave each of the kids a “carrot” made of play dough.

 Rachel had a great ’sensory’ box filled with Easter ‘grass’ and hidden “ovals” (their shape of the day).  The kids had to dig through the grass to find 10 mini chocolate eggs each.  

 They LOVED this.  Once they found all the eggs the kids took turns counting out their ten eggs.

Then Rachel read “Happy Easter, Curious George” by Margret & H.A. Rey.  The kids loved this too.

 Sorry for all the blurry pics I just had my phone with me.

In the Book Curious George found a little hiding Easter Bunny.  Rachel had the kids paint bunnies using peeps as stamps.

 Then they got to see what a peep does when it is warmed up in a microwave.

The kids had an Easter Egg hunt outside.  There were ten hidden eggs with the numbers 1-10.

Once they found all the eggs the kids lined them up numerically.

Finally they got to enjoy these adorable egg-shaped popsicles.

Thank you Rachel!! It was a super fun party.  The kids (and I) had a blast!

Spring/ Easter week

April 8th - Spring/Easter week!

Of course I forgot to take pictures again. :(

Today we focused on the Resurrection part of Easter and on Springtime.

-Right after Calendar we read a book called The First Easter about The Crucifixion and Resurrection. Then we watched a short video from lds.org about it called He Is Risen. The kids liked the book alright and were pretty good sitting and listening to it but when we watched the video they were great! All for of them sat and watched the whole video and were very interested in it. I wasn't sure how well they would handle watching the crucifixion even though it wasn't very graphic but they all did well and asked question or pointed things out. After the video was over we they pointed out that it was sad when Jesus died but happy that He lives again. I explained that this is why we celebrate Easter.
-We listened to the primary song "Did Jesus Really live again" and I taught them the last line which says "Did Jesus really live again after He had died, Oh yes, and so shall I."

-Letters!
    We have 4 letters this week. A,B,C,D. I decided to do all 4 today. We went on a "Letter" egg hunt. When they found the eggs they had to tell me which letters they found.

-Shapes!
  Our shapes this week are oval and circle. I combined the shapes today too. They each got a paper with a large Easter egg on it (oval) and they glued some small fuzzy pom pom circles to their oval. They had fun with this since they could glue the pom poms on wherever they wanted. Dax was the only one that put all of his inside the egg, the other three glued the pom poms to the outline of the egg.  

-Spring!
We read about the Spring season, that the sun shines, baby birds chirp and flowers grow: then
We went on a Spring Walk outside. They each had a buddy that they had to hold hands with outside so we didn't lose anyone. They all liked being buddies. We used our senses and "saw, smelled, felt and heard," spring. They saw lots of flowers, trees, the sun, the clouds, the birds. They smelled the flowers. We heard birds chirping. We felt the warm sunshine and a lite breeze.

-Snacktime! We had apple juice and a "kite" brownie and talked about flying kites in springtime.

-Springtime Science!
    We made rainclouds. The boys loved this, Riley wasn't into it as much :) I filled jars 3/4 full of water and put shaving cream on top. They thought it was neat that the shaving cream stayed on top of the water. I then mixed blue food coloring in water in a bowl and they kiddos used a small syringe to fill their "cloud" with "rain." The blue coloring would slowly fall out of the shaving cream and into the water beneath and it looked like rain falling out of a cloud. It was really neat and they wanted to do it over and over again.

-Art project!
    We made an "April showers bring May flowers" art project. They got to color their paper plate umbrellas and cut them in half. They also made grass by cutting little slits into a thin piece of green paper. They used their glue to glue their grass, umbrella and some pre-cut flowers onto their paper. Then they added some fingerprint raindrops using blue paint.

Our color today was blue so we talked about what color our rain was in our rain clouds and what color pain we used to make raindrops on our art project.

We had a lot of fun today. They all did pretty well with everything, even though they were getting a little restless at the end. :)

April 10th

Dr. Suess/Eric Carle Week

This was my favorite week so far!!  The kids were so engaged and happy.  We all had a great time reading books from these two amazing authors and doing lots of fun activities.

Our first day was the day after Dr. Suess’s birthday.  So we did all things Dr. Suess.

• Calendar Time: Read "Dr. Suess’s ABC’s”  While the kids acted out all the different animals in the book.
• We read “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish”  And then played a fishing game.  This was a great activity to enforce taking turns.
• Read “Bartholomew and the Oobleck”  Then the kids made “Oobleck”  It was a simple science experiment that the kids were able to do almost on their own.  They simply added Elmers glue and dyed Borax solution to their little cup.  They LOVED this.
• Next we read “The Foot Book” then we drew our feet on a paper and they ‘measured’ their feet with different objects.  This gave me a chance to teach them about measuring.  And gave them great fine motor exercises and practice counting.
• For Snack time I made them “Cat Hats” out of strawberries and bananas and “green eggs” (hard boiled eggs with guacamole).  While they ate I read “Green Eggs and Ham”.
• After snacks we played a cat in the hat dice/counting game.  The kids had to roll a dice and find a stripe with a corresponding number. 
• Finally we read “If I Ran the Zoo”  and the kids designed their own crazy animal with dough pipe cleaners and googley eyes.

The Next day we did Eric Carle Books.  Again the kids were amazing. 

• For Calendar Time we read “Head to Toe” the kids loved acting this one out.  Our letter of the day was S so we also read “Will you be my friend?” and the kids made the SSSSSS/snakey sound as we followed the snakes tail to the end.  Finally they let me read a third book, “Polar Bear, Polar Bear What do You Hear?” They loved making each of the animals sounds and we talked about hearing and sound.
• Our Shape for the week was symmetrical shapes.  So I had the kids build different shapes with wicky sticks and then use a small mirror to see how they are the same on both sides.  I was surprised at how much they enjoyed doing this activity.  
• We then read “the Mixed Up Chameleon” and then the kids went out side to ‘hunt’ for chameleons throughout the yard.
• We read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”.  We reviewed our days of the week and talked about the life cycle of a caterpillar/butterfly.  The kids then made caterpillars by stringing dyed cheerios onto a pipe cleaner.  Then they cut colored paper and made butterfly wings like the butterfly in the book.
• For our Snack time we read “Pancake, Pancake!” and the kids made the Pancake batter.  Then got to enjoy their cooking.
• Finally we read “Little Cloud”.  The kids then chose what shape they wanted their little cloud to be from cookie cutters.  We traced the shape and they ‘painted’ in the shape with a glue/paint then filled it in with cotton to make their ‘little cloud’.