We will be having a Holiday Performance Friday, December 20th at 3:30 pm. The children in both the Blue Room and Purple Room have been working really hard to learn some new songs and we would love to invite family and friends to join us. We are making shirts at school to wear for the Holiday Performance. We are very excited and hope that you all can make it!
We have had pine cones on our nature library table for quite some time, and this past week, in honor of "D" week and the holidays, we painted and "D"ecorated them. A lot of the children remarked how the pine cones looked like little Christmas trees.
It was fun to see the children mix a piece of nature with our art supplies to create their own masterpiece!
During group time we talked about wreaths and looked up some different pictures of wreaths and what they were made of. The children found one that they really liked, which inspired us to make our own. The children laid out our branches by size, ordering them big, medium, and small, and we started to glue our biggest branches together first. We shared a lot of laughs as J, K, and S would give me itty bitty pieces of branches and tell me to glue them as if they were big enough. Your children are developing very good senses of humor!
Starting to "D"ecorate our wreath. Getting creative! Be sure to check out our finished product hanging on the "D"oor.
Going on a stick hunt to build ourselves a Christmas tree.
Our class painted these cardboard tubes a couple weeks ago and we decided to make our our Christmas tree out of them. Our class found some bigs sticks so we had to "D"rill bigger holes.
A working hard to add a stick to our tree for a branch.
E, E, and P worked hard to add more branches to our tree. P stated that, "we could just go buy one at Home Depot." :)
As we were trying to build our Christmas tree it fell over quite a few times, so we decided that we needed to build a stand for it. What better way than with a handy dandy tissue box. J decorated it and later that evening we glued our tree in and filled the stand with sand.
In PreK, Teacher Karen talked all about Hanukkah and played Dreidel which is a four sided spinning top. Each of the four sides of the dreidel has a different letter from the Hebrew alphabet. The four different letters stood for nothing, half, all, and put in. Teacher Karen brought gold coins for us to play with. We really enjoyed playing, and we realized that spinning a top was much harder than we thought.
We have started to read some winter and holiday books, many of which have really neat winter landscapes. So in our books, we took a look at the mountains, snow falling on the trees, the snowmen, etc, and we decided to depict a winter landscape of our own using white chalk, black paper, and some winter stickers.
The pictures were really creative with regard to what our friends envisioned the snow to be like.
We talked all about letter "D" this week. We see the letter "D" everyday for the month of "D"ecember. Our friend S brought a "D"rum for sharing. He showed us a couple of different ways to hold the drum and play it.
A brought a remote control "D"og. The children were really excited to see her walk the little "D"oggy.
Teacher Romina brought a "D"og to school for sharing too. It was a poodle and it would shake its head and wag its tail. The children asked the poodle many questions to see if the poodle would shake its head back and forth, indicating no, or would the poodle wag its tail, indicating yes. Many great questions came about, such as: Do you like me? Do you want to play with me? Do you like Tangled? and many more. The poodle shook her head no for so many things but one that surprised us was when J asked, "do you like Star Wars?" And the poodle wagged its tail. We all laughed!
P is taking a turn at stirring our hot chocolate.
Yay Pajama Day! Our class chose to "D"rink their hot (warm) chocolate outside on the "D"irt hill. It was soo yummy!
Science time. Friday afternoon we set up a science experiment and talked about "D"issolving. We tried to predict if a piece of corn starch packaging foam would dissolve faster in warm water or in cold water.
The children noticed that the corn starch packaging foam dissolved noticeably faster in the warm water.
Teacher Karen showed us what corn starched looked like. As the packaging dissolved the children noticed that the water got bubbly and kinda sticky.
We had a very fun week and have been really excited about winter and the holidays. Please dress your children in warm clothes as we will continue to play outside throughout the winter. When it starts to rain please bring rain boots, rain jackets, and an umbrella. Thanks for all your support.
Hugs,
Teacher Kristina
