Second week of February...

A very cold week here and we were not able to spend much time outdoors. We still managed to have a very fun week full of learning and much activity. I am so looking forward to seeing the green (or even close to green) grass again, a dry playground, and not having to help six children dress in all the winter clothing to go outdoors. I miss not getting outdoors daily!

We continued learning the alphabet with the letter Pp this week. Like always we did several letter Pp activities and completed our Letter Pp Book. My daycare children just love these books and can't wait to see what is on the next page... and the exciting part... they are learning their letters and sounds. Below are photo's of our Letter Pp Book. We do many forms of alphabet activities daily besides our letter books. One of the activities we do is match the uppercase and lowercase letters and put them up on the ABC Boards we have in our daycare room. I spread the letters out on the table and call out a letter that a specific child must find. They take them up to the ABC Boards and place them in the correct place. I use velcro on the back of the letters and on the boards to make this an easy activity. We reviewed the number 7 this week. We completed the following activity sheets as part of our review. After reviewing number 7 we moved on to number 8. We did many hands-on counting activities and we did several activity sheets to help reinforce the number. Here are a few of the activity sheets we did. The children were so excited to hear we were going to start learning about dinosaurs (even the one little girl I have). Teaching is real easy when they are excited, engaged, and eager to learn about something. I had fun with the dinosaur projects we did this week! This week we talked about the stegasaurus and the brontosaurus. Here is a few of the projects we did. I also used the dinosaur theme to help review some skills as I am starting assessments and want some concepts fresh in their minds. These are a few of the skills we reviewed. We also did some Valentine's projects for the coming holiday. Art is always fun and it's a great way to add a lot of color to our daycare room. Below are a few of our projects.

And where would our week be without plenty of play time. Here are a few moments out of our play time.



(I had some great videos... but never realized how long they would take to load. So no videos for now.)

And the "hit" of the week... an obstacle course. It was very simple and set up in our small daycare room so we could get the hang of it. We crawled under a parachute, dropped an empty toilet tube into a small container that was at our nose level, crawled under Miss Rose's chair, jumped over block walls, did a somersault on the pillows and zig-zagged through our chairs. What fun!!!




A great week! Hope you enjoyed.

First week of February

It's already February... hard to believe! Time just flies. This week was a good week full of fun activities that the children accomplished. I did have to close for the first time in 21 years due to ice... we live on an easement of three homes and the hill going up to the main road, the easement, and my driveway had about 1 and 1/2 inches of slippery ice at 6:00 am. It was a mess and after salting and waiting two hours we all (my kids, my hubby, and I) went out to scrape the driveway and hill on the easement... never knew how badly I am out of shape! I was in pain the next two days... although scrapping ice and shoveling it up isn't easy work since the salt just made it possible to scrape. So even with being closed on Wednesday and missing a few Groundhog Day projects, we managed to get pretty much accomplished.

This week we learned about the letter Oo. We learned our letter movement for Oo, sang our Oo song from Mrs. Jones Kindergarten site, and completed our letter books. We also played some games and did some other activities to reinforce the letter Oo. Below I have our letter Oo book.

We practiced printing letters and spelling as we all wrote letters and then writing words... sounding out, reading, and then printing words on our individual dry erase boards. The children love this activity and it really helps them with the concept of tapping out and sliding the sounds together to read a word.


We reviewed counting and number recognition and learned the number seven this week. The children love doing motions the number of times we are learning... so this week we learned seven... we clapped seven times, touched our nose seven times, jumped seven times, touched our toes seven times and did many other movements. Here are some of the activity papers we did. I don't remember where I got the first one from but it was a homeschooling blog.






We are learning our phone numbers this month. All month we will read our phone numbers and then say them on there own when they are ready. I have their phone numbers on their name shapes (has their name that they spell each day, their birth date, and their phone numbers) that we review daily during circle time. This week we made phones to take home so they could practice their phone numbers at home.



We started on Monday learning about Groundhog's Day. Most of the children didn't want the groundhog to see his shadow because they are tired of the cold and snow, but a couple like winter and want the snow around a while longer.
We started off by looking at pictures of the groundhog and discussing the significance of Groundhog's Day. We made shadows with flashlights and toys and then made a picture with our own shadow. I found this idea on "Treasure the Days".




We did several pocket chart shadow matching games. My ink ran short on one of the games, but the children still enjoyed it.





And we made Groundhog puppets.



Our first valentine's project was a mosiac heart in which we practiced our scissor skills.



We also waterpainted a heart... but I forgot to get a picture. :(
We also did a heart matching activity.



Lastly, on Friday we started our dinosaur theme. We talked about dinosaurs and how they are extinct and how we know they lived long ago. We made imprint fossils that are drying this weekend. The children thought this was a lot of fun and can't wait to paint their fossil next week.




Hope you enjoyed our week as much as we did!