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’.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Geography Continued - USA

This was our last week of Geography/Culture since it was just following President’s Day our theme was the United States.

Our first day this week wasn’t as effective as I had hoped.  So we switched gears day two and did a lot more gross motor and group activities.  This made a huge difference!

Some of our activities this week included:

• Puzzles
• Board Game (we played candy land, just to reinforce turn taking, they loved this)
• Reading time; ‘How to Make an American Pie’, ‘George Washington’, ‘Circling the Globe: USA’, ‘If you give a Pig a Pancake’ (Our letter the second day was P)
• O is for Olympics, we talked about the Olympics going on right now, the kids painted the olympic rings
• Cut, pasted and painted an American Flag
• Made Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty “masks”
• Played games using US money
• Made personalized coins/money
• Made Bald Eagles

Also for day two because I really wanted to switch things up and be more effective I got a “story time” kit from the library.  This had a flannel board and pieces as well as a list of different movement activities, songs and games.  This worked really well.  It kept all the kids engaged the entire time.  I will definitely be doing that again.

 Doing a U.S. Puzzle.  The kids did well identifying the country and state we live in.

Building their ‘masks’.  They all cut out their own stripes (Uncle Sam) and spikes (Lady Liberty) and glued or painted their masks.  

 Our cute Uncle Sams and Lady Liberty

 Painting the Olympic rings for the letter O

 Cutting and Pasting for the American Flag.  That cute Riley would cut all day!

Hand print painting for the stripes.  Dax and Adam loved this.  Clean Riley and James were not thrilled about getting their hands messy.  James was so upset about doing this Dax offered to do James’ flag too.

We looked at all the different US coins.  We talked about the different presidents on them and how they all have different names and different pictures on the back.  Then I had the kids stand in front of their coin (they all selected the color they wanted) while the other kids took turns holding a flash light to get their shadow and trace their silhouette.  They actually did much better for this than I anticipated.

The kids then got to name their ‘money’ I love what they came up with...

 They also got to color whatever they wanted for the back picture of their coin.  Adam drew “pyramids” James drew “the hoover dam” (he just went on a tour a couple days before and has been a little obsessed since), Dax drew a rainbow and Riley drew “flowers”.

Finally we talked about our national bird and the kids built these bald eagles.