Thanksgiving

Dramatic Play
We had the housekeeping/kitchen set up back. I added some turkey plates and cups to make it more Thanksgiving-ish. They loved cooking Thanksgiving feasts for each other!

Blocks
We played with mega blocks. I also brought out some trucks and tractors. I'm loving having this extra shelf for either dramatic play, or the block center, to add a few extra things the kids can pull out. There were also puzzles of things we learned about in past themes.

Art
We made turkeys, kinda :) I actually just had out glue and feathers and eyes, plus markers if they needed to draw anything. A few decided to make turkeys, but many made monsters, people, or just glued things together. It's why I love open-ended art! They can do and make whatever they want!


Day 2, we painted with feathers, and pipe cleaner turkey feet. It was funny watching them stomp the feet and act like turkeys as they painted.

Day 3, after our field trip, we did a turkey craft one of our moms supplied. The kids got to glue the turkey head and fathers to a body made of a brown paper sack. It was lots of fun, and really glue-y!

Small Manipulatives
The first day, we had our chameleons from last week out. They had been left to dry over the weekend, then I added the top spinning plate. They enjoyed playing with their plates and the stuffed chameleon.
 
We had out our favorite fall manipulatives, the squirrel pattern cards and apple counting cards.For Thanksgiving, we added turkey feather counting cards. They also liked playing with the feathers by sorting them by color.


I also added Leap Frog ABC magnets to the magnet board.
 
Outside
We played with wheat in the sensory table outside, along with all the other fun things to play out there! They really liked the wheat for digging and pouring. It's just so relaxing.

Large Group
We learned the word gratitude, and each day read a new Thanksgiving book. They taught about the pilgrims and Indians, and also about things we can be grateful for today. After reading each day, I also had them add thankful leaves to our tree, making it a thankful tree. Many ideas were pretty general, like family and friends, and some got pretty specific, like green popsicles. We also kinda learned the song, Over the River and Through the Woods.

On day 1, we reviewed our colors with Skittles turkey sorting mats. They got to sort their pile of Skittles by color, then they could eat them, or put them in a bag to bring home.

Day 2, we wrote in our journal about things we are thankful for. We also made our name turkeys, where the kids had to put the feathers with letters of their name in order. Their names were written on their turkey body to help. I didn't take pics, but you should have seen their turkey come home!

Day 3, was our field trip to Dick's! Thanks to all of you who came. Our host, Randy, was great with the kids and let them run and jump and be loud, so they all had a lot of fun. We toured the back of the store and saw where all the groceries are stored. We even got to go inside the fridges and freezers, and moo at customers from behind the milk.
We got to check out the loading dock, and ride up and down. They even got to go inside a frito lay truck, which they thought was amazing. Then they got to feed cardboard to the cardboard recycle monster. My son has been talking about that part ever since.
As we walked past the meat counter, we were also stopped by a customer who thought the kids were just so cute, she had to give each of them a dollar, including all the younger baby siblings. The kids loved that part!!
The bakery was pretty amazing too. We got to see glazed donuts, freshly dipped, and the giant ovens, plus watch the cake decorators at work.
The kids' favorite part was eating chocolate chip cookies at the end.
Once back at school, we added our favorite foods we are thankful for to our thankful tree, and they all said cookies!

Small Group
My group practiced rhyming words. I have a fall harvest game, with matching rhyming words. Rhyming is a difficult skill at this age, but I think worth introducing. They all did great at recognizing which words rhymed as I said them out loud, but did struggle with finding rhyming matches in the pictures by themselves. We worked as a group to match the rhyming cards. This is a skill we'll be working on all year.

Miss Kim's group played a harvest counting game. They all had harvest mats with pictures of grouped vegetables, and had to match the numeral cards to the correct amount of vegetables. They are doing wonderfully with their numbers and counting!

Both of these games were found at Kelly's Kindergarten.

Colors

Parents, sorry I have not stayed as caught up on the blog as I should! The goal is to post the weekend after the theme, but life has been too crazy to get to it. I am caught up now, and should hopefully stay that way now! 3 kids are crazy, plus my husband works from home on our computer, so I have to wait until night, when we're much busier. That problem has now been solved, and I should stay more caught up. Thanks for your patience!

Dramatic Play



Paint Store. Thanks to all of our painting projects this year with the bathroom remodel, and building the play house, I had lots of empty paint cans for the store. Lots of brushes and stir sticks too. The color samples were gathered from Lowes and Home Depot, then I just added the cash register and shopping carts.

As usual, the cash register was a hit, and they spent a lot of time shopping for blocks and scanning the legos on the belt. I guess the paint cans were just too big!

The paint supplies were a hit all on their own. While I did see kids buying paint, they just loved taking the cans and brushes all over the room to paint the walls and furniture. It was a lot of fun.

Blocks (I forgot to take pics)

Week 1, we had out waffle blocks. These are new, donated by a sweet neighbor, and are a huge hit! They can build tracks and roads easily, and they loved that.

Week 2, we had out Duplo legos, then the foam blocks.

Art
Day 1, we simply painted with primary color paint, so they could start exploring with mixing colors.

Day 2, we used colored beads to make necklaces and bracelets.

Day 3, we had tubs full of baking soda, and bottles of red, yellow, and blue colored vinegar. This is more sensory than art, and they loved it! They not only got to experiment with mixing colors, but they got to watch it fizz and bubble too. They were so great at sharing, as well. Each kid got one tub and could use it until their vinegar was gone, then they let someone else have their seat while they played something else.


















Once everyone was done, we used the art table to make their painted toast for snack. I colored some milk red, yellow, and blue, and they used pastry brushes to brush it onto bread, then we toasted it.

Day 4, we did Jello art. They had glue and shakers full of different colors and flavors of Jello to sprinkle on. They had a lot of fun with this too and I had a huge stack of pictures afterwards! It was messy, but the room smelled so good for days! Way better than the vinegar day :)

 

Small Manipulatives

Paint chip cards with matching clothespins

Folder games

Rainbow cards with pom poms and tweezers

Color puzzles










 

Colored horses with matching clothespin legs















Color Dinosaurs


Snack

Our color-specific snacks were colored goldfish that we sorted before we ate them, and the painted toast.

Sensory Table
Days 1 and 4, I had bottles of primary colored water that they could mix in clear tubs. This was a huge hit both days, and I loved seeing all the color combinations they created!
I forgot to take a pic, but here's one from last year:
 

Days 2 and 3, we checked on our decomposing pumpkin and observed its changes.

Large Group

Day 1, we read White Rabbit's Color Book and added colored water to cups with paper towels sticking out of them to start an experiment.

Day 2, we read Mouse Paint and checked on our experiment. The colors had risen up the paper towels, and dripped into the empty cups to mix and make new colors. We mixed the remaining colors, just to get to watch them change.

Day 3, we watched this Primary Colors video (several times, by popular demand), and read Color Train, then sorted things by color.

Day 4, we read The Mixed Up Chameleon. We then painted paper plates to make our changing chameleons.

We also learned 3 new songs, Mitch the Fish, Scat the Cat, and a rainbow song.

I'm Scat the Cat, I'm a happy cat,
if you don't like my color, you can change it like that!

I'm Mitch the Fish, I can swim and I can swish,
I can change my color, if I wish!

Small Group
Miss Kim was not able to come these last 2 weeks, so these activities were actually done as a whole group, instead. The kids did very well!!

Day 1, we read Freight Train, then searched for colors around the room. You can even see that chairs and bean bags were brought over! They had so much fun sorting.

Day 3, we mixed play dough together to make our color wheels.

Day 4, we made paint mixing worksheets and mixed all the primary colors together to make secondary colors.


We mixed the primary colors in so many different ways, on every day, so I hope the kids remember now all the colors they can make from the primary colors! We had a fun and messy week playing with color!

Happy Halloween!

Dramatic Play
I kept up the apple orchard and pumpkin patch from learning about fall last week. We had just added the pumpkins, and on Thursday, I added more Halloween things like ghosts and bats in the sky, and black cats and jack-o-lanterns below.















Blocks

Day 1, I had out almost all of our dress ups. This was so much fun! We had pirates, knights, princesses, clowns, dragon, flamingo, polar bear, Elmo, witches, a pumpkin, and more! The witch was the favorite, because it glowed in the dark. They each had to take a turn to wear it, and I was leading groups in and out of the storage room most of the day.

Day 2, I made a spider web out of masking tape and filled it with spiders and insects. They loved playing with it, plus I showed them how to walk and balance on the web, so it was a great large motor game.


Art
 Day 1, Halloween stamps
 
Day 2, Frozen pumpkin-shaped paint. Frozen paint is so fun because it colors like chalk at first, then more like paint as it melts. It's a fun sensory and artistic activity.


Small Manips

Day 1, spider web lacing. They could make webs on the plates, plus sew spider rings onto it too.

Day 2, pumpkin seed counting in pumpkin trays

Magnet Board
Magnetic Build a Witch from the dollar store.


Writing Table
Halloween stickers. They loved adding these onto pictures they made at the art table too.


Sensory Table
We had a pumpkin cut in half, filled with creepy Halloween creatures.

Snack
Day 1, we had a healthy Halloween with banana ghosts, witch broomsticks, and orange pumpkins.


Day 2, they each made their own mummy dogs with hot dogs and crescent rolls.

 Large Group

Day 1, we read and acted out the book, There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat.
 We also learned the songs 5 Little Pumpkins and Spider on the Floor.

Day 2, was our Halloween party. We were in small groups and rotated through several fun activities like Pin the Tail on the Cat, Halloween Memory, Pumpkin counting, Don't Eat Frank, and making potions.

Small Group

My group read Spiders Spiders Everywhere and made spider counting books. You may notice some of their counting is off, but we worked on it and counted together and crossed out mistakes. So don't worry if work comes home with mistakes! We're always learning and mistakes are proof of that.

Miss Kim's group read about pumpkins and made the pumpkin life cycle.

All about Fall!!

Dramatic Play

I am so grateful to Pinterest for this one! I combined a few ideas I found for our apple orchard/leaf raking/pumpkin patch dramatic play center this month.

The apple trees were the biggest hit! I'm grateful to Pinterest for the idea of using the velcro and balls for the apples, especially because I could use all 3 colors of apples. It was great for learning about apple varities, and sorting colors!
This center was a learning curve for me, as the kids played and I had to tweak it a little. I first just made the trees of construction paper, but the strong velcro kept pulling them off the wall. So I taped it together and got it laminated. It worked much better that way. It still wasn't perfect, as the velcro sometimes came off the tree or balls, but it worked well enough.

I took the pumpkins out the first 2 days of the center, so it wasn't so overwhelming. Then, I added them in to change it up and it brought some interest back. That also made them want to be farmers, so I had to get out my cowboy hats and vests, then they requested the stick horses. I also added the shopping carts, because they needed to carry their pumpkins they bought from the farmers.

I was surprised how much they played in the leaves too! I couldn't find any big rakes, I should have bought some in the summer, but they loved the small ones just fine. They would rake piles and jump in them, not caring that they didn't really provide cushion. They also had fun gathering them into the boxes, then taking turns lying down and dumping leaves on each other and burying each other.

I love adding the books too. It gets kids interested in reading who might not go to the reading center that day, and it taught them more about real orchards and pumpkin patches.


Blocks
The orchard and pumpkin patch reminded me of farming, and since we're not doing a farm unit this year, I got out all the farm toys. They loved it and wanted it back, so it stayed out all 3 days.

I also kept the cars out and added farm puzzles, plus some shape ones from last week, to the shelf. I've found I like having options to pull out besides what's out, but they need to be limited if I don't want a huge mess! The counting farm puzzles were played with every day!

Art
Day 1, we painted fall pictures with fall colored tissue paper squares, and liquid starch.

Day 2, we made apple prints. I cut them in half both ways, so they could also see the star the seeds make. We had red, yellow, and green, plus orange if they wanted their prints to look like pumpkins.

Day 3, we did apple, pumpkin, and leaf spin art. This was a huge hit, and a busy center all day! I had papers cut out in apple, pumpkin, and leaf shapes for them to choose from, and fall colors out. I add a little water to thin the paint, and they use eye droppers to squirt it onto their papers. I do that to add fine motor skills. Then they spin them in salad spinners.

Small Manipulatives
Day 1, fall floor puzzle

Day 2, fall pattern cards and manipulatives

Day 3, apple counting mats. They did these with me in small group last week, now they got to play on their own. Print your own from Kelly's Kindergarten.

Snack
Day 1, we had a mom come in and bring different apples to sample. They loved tasting and learning about different apples, and getting to keep some seeds too!

Day 2, we had apple chips and apple juice, plus some crackers.

Day 3, we made applesauce. They loved this so much! They each got turns using my victorio strainer to smash the apples, and turn it to get applesauce. They loved all the "gross parts" too, which is just peels, stems, and seeds. We added cinnamon and they loved it. Most of them had seconds.

Outside

Sensory table
I filled with with black beans, then added fall things like real acorns, plus plastic acorns, pumpkins, and apples. They really liked playing here and gathering and sorting the fall-related toys.

They also still love playing with the diggers, swing set, and sandbox. The play house is always fun too. We also played some baseball and basketball this week.

Large Group

Day 1, we used corn syrup and food coloring to paint leaves. This is a favorite activity I love to do every year. It's sticky, and takes a long time to dry, but I love the final product! It's also fun to learn about mixing colors, as I just use yellow and red, and they have to mix them to make orange, if they want orange. They are now hanging in our class tree.

Day 2, we went on a walk to find deciduous leaves and trees. I was so impressed of their use of the word "deciduous!" They screamed it every time they found a tree with changing leaves. They also gathered leaves and we helped them make observations of them on their leaf hunt paper. We even got to taste freshly picked grapes at my neighbor's house (one of our classmate's grandmas), and they found some fresh raspberries to pick and taste at my house too. So glad we got to see, smell, touch, and taste fall!

Day 3, we wrote in our journals about our favorite thing about fall.

Each day, we sang songs and practiced our new word, deciduous. I was stressed a few days before the theme started, because Sesame Street no longer had their deciduous videos on their site. Luckily, I found them, and the kids loved them! Here they are, if you want to watch with them.
Deciduous tree
Deciduous rap

We sang "10 Red Apples hanging in a tree" and learned 10 different ways we can eat apples. This song is so old, it's on a cassette tape. They were fascinated I had to rewind it.
We also sang "Leaves are falling," which they love, because I dump leaves on them as we sing, and they get to gather and throw leaves on themselves.
5 Little Pumpkins was also a big hit! We sang the Raffi version.

Small Group
My group practiced number recognition and counting with apple tree counting and little apples.
Kim's group made leaf rubbings with crayons. This was actually a kind of difficult small motor activity, but they had fun.