Ocean Animals

We had a lot of fun during ocean animals week. Dramatic play was a beach, similar to what we had for our summer DP here. Except my cool trees lost their leaves, so no palm trees this time.

The kids were really into the fish toys and posters all over the room and were always asking what kinds of fish they all were. They loved racing the fish and chasing each other with the sharks too.

I have 3 ocean floor puzzles and we spent a lot of time on them this week. Puzzles are such a great skill for kids and they have a lot of fun putting them together and breaking them apart again.

We did a lot of math and number recognition this week too. These math puzzles from Lakeshore are some of my favorites that I have! I have a lot of them, and we've played with them before, so now they really knew how to use them when I got out the ocean ones. In order to see the picture, you have to put the numbers in order from 1-10. There's no fitting pieces into tricky spots or anything, just knowing your numbers and how to get them in order. I love that you can see right away if you got it wrong because the picture doesn't look right. We did these together several times, practicing our counting and naming the numbers. Number recognition is all about repetition, and this was great practice for us!

We did more math in large group with our new song, 5 Little Crabs. Instead of having the kids help hold the crab pictures, we had them on the board and them subtracted as the song went along. I already learned with 5 Little Monkeys that we're not quite ready to subtract ourselves and sit down-we want to hold a monkey the whole song! They did great with this activity and counting to 5! We also played a fish counting board game in large group where they picked a card, counted how many of that fish in the picture, then match the card to the picture. They did so great, they played it alone in self-select time the next week and all remembered how to play.

The highlight of the week was our growing sting ray. I love Dollar Tree! We measured it the first day, then put it in water. They were checking every few minutes and having me pull it out to compare to our first measurement. They were so sure he was growing by the second. Wednesday was a real treat because he had doubled in size and outgrew his jar! Weeks later, he's dried up and shrunk back down, and they still ask how he's doing!

Other fun things were eating our ocean in a cup, which was swedish fish in blue jello, and sewing with ocean lacing cards (an excellent fine motor skill). We also sang and danced to a lot of music! The kids have really enjoyed turning songs on during self-select time too and I love it!