Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Our Last Week in November...

This week was a very short week for us. We made Thanksgiving cards on Monday and I forgot to take a picture, so I can't share them with you. We used a template from childcareland.com for the inside of the card and did a coloring page for the front of the card. They turned out really cute.

On Tuesday we had our annual "Thanksgiving Feast" in which I cooked a turkey, mashed potato, and dressing and my daycare families each brought a dish and we all shared a meal together. I am very lucky that all of my children had a parent or grandparent to share the meal with. They gave their cards that we made on Monday to the adult who attended. This is always a highlight for the daycare and the children get so excited!

On Wednesday we did a trace and match Thanksgiving page. Again I forgot to take a picture. :(

We matched numbers from childcareland.com which was a fun way to recognize numbers.





We waterpainted scarecrows. I find it so interesting how they use colors on their waterpaintings.






Lastly, we had fun playing a game in which they take soft socks rolled into balls and threw them back and forth. They really enjoyed this game and used a lot of energy playing. Another provider gave me this idea on on of my provider lists.




Hope everyone has a very blessed Thanksgiving!

Friday, November 19, 2010

Our third week in November

This week we learned the letter Ii. We did many activities to reinforce the letter Ii and the short sound of Ii. Below is our letter book for the letter Ii. I used many of the resources I've collected over the years. I also posted our letter song that I got from Mrs. Jones Kindergarten site. I love having a letter song to sing to reinforce the letter and sound. We also do many phonemic awareness skills with the words for the song like clap the syllables.








We did a math turkey project in which we needed to match the dots on the feathers to the numbers on the turkey to know where the feathers needed to be glued down. We then decorated our turkeys.




We then talked a lot about the Native Americans... who they were and how they are related to Thanksgiving. We made a Native American paper piecing.




We continued our conservation unit by talking about the proper way to wash our hands and face and how much water we should use so that we don't waste water. We did the following activity sheet and talked as we colored how much water to use in the sink and a picture of them at the sink. We are always reviewing proper handwashing procedures as it is so important in a daycare setting.




We continued our talk about the Native Americans and did a stringing activity to make our Indian necklaces.




And then we made Indian corn. We used little bottle painters to make the colorful corn and fingerpaint to make the husk.





We made a thankful turkey in which we wrote one thing that we were thankful for. This was a very difficult task for my group as many of them picked things they could see at that moment vs. things like their family, homes, food, etc.




We talked a lot about Pilgrims... who they were, where they came from, and how the first Thanksgiving evolved. We waterpainted stand-up pilgrims and iserted their picture for the face. The children thought these were the greatest things, because the Pilgrim became them.




Hope you enjoyed our activities!

Our Second Week in November

This week we learned the letter Hh. We did many activities to learn and reinforce the letter and it's sound. Here is the letter book I made using a wide variety of resources I've collected over the years.







We continued our conservation by talking about how we heat and cool our homes. We made homes to remind us to keep the door closed when we are heating or cooling our homes to save energy.



We talked about sets that have more or most using real objects and then reinforcing it by coloring the set with the most on an activity sheet.





We then spent a lot of time reversing it and talking about least. Least seems to be a hard concept for many of my preschoolers over the years, so I spend a lot of time on it. We did many of the same activities as we did for most, but just finding which one has less.



We learned the color blue this week. We found things that were blue around our daycare room and using math counting manipulatives. We also used our math skills while finding blue objects by finding a certain number of blue things. We found blue shapes, colored pictures blue, and made a Blue's Clue painting using crayon for the patches on Blue and blue waterpaint for the rest. I thought they turned out very cute!







We talked about traffic safety and what a traffic light is. We made a strip that we read together that told us what the colors on the traffic light mean. We then made a large traffic light.






We made another turkey this week. We waterpainted the turkey and I hung them off the ceiling as a nice November decoration for November.




Hope you enjoyed what we did this week!

Our First Week of November...

Welcome to our first week of November. This week we are working on many different things. We focused all week on the letter Gg doing many different activities. Below I have our "Letter Gg Books" that I made using many resources I've collected over the years.







We talked a lot about the concept of more in which we looked at sets to determine which one has more with objects. We looked at containers full of liquid and decided which one had more. And to reinforce we did the following activity sheets.






This month we are focusing some of our time on conservation. We talked about how electricity gets into our homes and why we must conserve electricity. We also talked about safety around electricity. We made a light switch to remind us to turn lights off when we leave a room. We also talked about how water comes into our homes and made pipes from the water tower to the faucet.




We talked about owls this week. One of our owl projects was to cut brown paper strips and make a collage owl.




We are going to be talking a lot about Thanksgiving so we made two different turkeys. The first turkey we fingerpainted and added features. The second is a traced hand turkey found at as one of the daily art activities on childcareland.






We talked about the concept of between and put many objects between others. After they had a good understanding of between we did the following activity where they had to glue an airplane between the clouds and glue a boy between the trees.



We learned the nursery rhyme, Georgie Porgie, and extended it by reviewing rhyming. We found the rhyming words in the rhyme and then built pies using rhyming picture words.



We learned the color orange this week and did many activities to identify orange. We did an orange coloring sheet and found orange objects in our math counting manipulatives. While finding orange objects in our math manipulatives we used math to make sets of so many orange objects depending on the number shown.




We learned the concept of upside down in which we all looked through our legs to see the world upside down. We used some of our math patterning pieces to find the one piece that was upside down. And we did a coloring sheet in which we colored the pictures that were upside down.




Lastly, we talked about what a cornucopia is and the meaning behind it. Then we did a paper piecing activity to make a cornucopia.



Just a quick peek at our front bulletin board.



Hope you enjoyed all the different activities we did this week!