Garden Week

This post is slightly behind.  About three weeks ago our theme was garden/plants.  The kids were so engaged and cooperative for this theme we were able to do a lot!

Day one:

• We read “Desert Plants” and talked about all the different plants near our homes.  
• Since we didn’t have a letter of the week but rather a review of the alphabet I read a couple of ABC books and had the kids sing their alphabet in different ways.
• Sang a couple of new songs like ’ten little flowers’ and ‘if you have a little seed’.
• We read another plant book from the library, I cannot recall the name.  It discussed different kinds of plants all over the world.  We talked about how plants are living and the things they need to survive.  Then we talked about the different parts of a plant.
• I had placed four different celery stalks in different colored water.  Each of the kids ‘dissected’ a celery stalk and ‘inspected’ their dissection to see how the water moves up the “straws”.  This showed the kids how plants “drink” their water.
• Next the kids do-a-dot painted flowers
• Then we went outside to look at different plants.  I showed them seeds that corresponded to the different plants.  
• They each put together their own chia-pet caterpillar.
• We did a little mosaic tile art making flowers and different plants.
• For snack time we ate plants - apples and oranges.
• The kids then practiced some fine motor and writing by tracing ‘water’ from a watering can to a flower and writing their names on the back of their paper.
• Finally we talked about Bees, butterflies and other flying insects and birds and how they help pollinate flowers and plants.  The kids then played “Bee Tag”  They LOVED this.  The kids were bees chasing flowers trying to catch some nectar for their hive.

Day 2:

• Today we focused more on reviewing our alphabet.  We played a bee/flower game where the kids had to match the upper case letter on the Bee with the lower case letter on the flower.  They worked together really well on this and did surprisingly well.
• Then the kids did a little fine motor tracing the number nine (our number of the day) and counting out nine flower stickers that they peeled and stuck on their “garden”
• We folded flower pots out of paper and the kids filled them with dirt.  I put starter basil plants in the pots and we reiterated what the plants would need to grow.
• We played a game I called “bug in my garden”  I put nine large plastic bugs in my garden. The kids took turns using salad tongs to ‘catch’ the bugs and get them out of the garden.  They really liked this game we did it about three different times.  It was great for taking turns and good fine motor with gripping the salad tongs.
• For snack time the kids had ABC crackers.
• Finally we read “Chicka-Chicka Boom-Boom”.  The kids made a ‘coconut tree’ of their own by glueing a trunk and using their hand print for the leaves.  Then I gave them all small ABC stickers to place all around the tree like in the book.  I couldn’t believe how great Riley was at this activity.  The stickers were quite small and took a lot of concentration to get off of the wrappers.  The boys each took a little while getting theirs off and onto their page.  Riley was able to get the stickers off better than I could.  She was done in half the time!

Another successful week with these fun little kiddos!

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