Second week of April...

This week we did learning time four out of the five days. The children needed a day to play, run, be outdoors, and make noise. They all benefited from being outdoors... I did too! I love "home" or family child care for that reason... we can make our schedules flexible to meet the needs of the children.

This week we learned the letter Vv.

We had fun learning about Vv and the sound of Vv. Each week we do a "letter movement" that I have taken from the "Hooked on Phonics" program and incorporated it into my curriculum. This week was V for van.

 We say the letter... "V"

We say the letter picture... "van" as we place our hands on our imaginary steering wheel

We say the letter sound... "/v/ /v/ /v/ as we pretend to steer our van

Being that I have 5 boys and 1 girl this weeks letter movement was a hit! Even the girl enjoyed it.

We continued with our letter books and did the Letter Vv Book this week. I've posted pictures of the book below.
We learned the numerals 11 and 12 this week.
This week we were counting sets of 11 and 12 and tracing the numbers.  We did a lot of counting and we also completed the following activity papers for counting/tracing.  I had the children use dot markers to help them count as some have a hard time counting the larger sets.

We also did some more counting pages that you can find here.



We learned about heavy and light.

This week we pulled out the balance scale and predicted how it would work and how it measures things.  I had several objects placed on the table that we talked about and put on the balance scale to see what would happen and if our predictions were correct.  The children then went through the daycare room looking for two toys they wanted to put on the balance scale.  They had to make predictions as to what would happen and then see if their prediction was right.  I also had to emphasize a lot that we had to pick things that would fit on the balance scale... a very hard concept for them!

And then we did an activity paper in which they had to decide if it were a heavy item or a light item and which side of the balance scale it belonged.

We continued on with our bird theme this week.

We talked a lot about the development of an egg with both a bird and a chick this week.  We sequenced the development and colored a bird hatching.

We also talked about how animals can be born from an egg and how animals can be born alive.  This was a little tricky until they realized that animals born alive have hair.  We did the following sorting activity.

We talked about where a bird will lay her eggs and why.  We had fun making a nest.  We colored a nest template brown and then glued crinkle strips to make the nest.

We also talked about the different kinds of food birds eat.  The children seemed to know a lot about this.  We made cheerio bird feeders using chenille wire and stringing cheerios.  I saw this on a few blogs but can't remember which ones... sorry, I just love looking at every one's ideas and gaining new ones for my program. The children just loved this and are so excited about feeding the birds... only wish the birds could be as excited!  :( 

We talked about the smallest bird... the hummingbird and learned all about it.  The children were very interested in how quick the bird is for his tiny size.  We made darting hummingbirds by coloring in an outline of the bird, putting some red glitter on the throat area and stapled to a drinking straw.  Very fun to dart around the room.

Our last bird for the week was the woodpecker.  The children actually knew quite a bit of information on this bird.  They had fun playing and watching the friction bird I made that I got the idea from here. You will need to watch the video to see how it works.  I've also included the template of the woodpecker I used that I got from http://www.clipartof.com/ and you can get it here.  Below is a picture of mine and it in use with some of the children.  This was easy for some and hard for others but eveyone had fun with it.

Lastly, we made a woodpecker everyone could make peck easily.  We colored a woodpecker template, made a tree with a half sheet of brown construction paper and colored holes black and made some brown lines to resemble a tree, and used a brad to put them together so the bird pecks.

I took some photo's of the children enjoying themselves outdoors.  I think getting children outdoors is so very important and we go outside at least once, if not, twice a day.

I hope you have enjoyed our week as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you!