4 Seasons

This post will be a little different, because it's easier to share what we did each day and how it pertained to that season, than it would be to post the different centers, like I usually do. Each day, we studied 1 of the 4 seasons. Here's what we did!

Fall

Dramatic Play: Pumpkin patch, apple tree, leaf raking


Blocks: 4 Seasons floor puzzle


Art: Fall-colored papers and fall foam stickers


Small Manipulatives: fall pattern cards


Writing: Scented twistables crayons

Large Group: we read about the 4 seasons and sang Round and Round the Seasons Go, and Leaves are Falling

Samll Group: My group played a game calling "Raking Rhymes" and practiced rhyming words, from here. The other group independently made contact paper leaf pictures.

Winter

Dramatic Play: Hot chocolate stand and snowball throwing


Blocks: ABC trains


Art: shaving cream and bears


Small Manipulatives: Snowman counting buttons, snowman building on the magnet board



Outside: It's March and snowed today, perfect for our theme! So we played in the snow and colored it with colored water squirters.

Large Group: we read A Snowy Day, then made snow pictures. We painted white with glitter on a blue paper, then added some Elmer's glue and Epsom salt on top to make it sparkly.

Small Group:
My group played snowflake racing. I had foam snowflakes spread on the ground with numbers 1-10 on them. I'd say a number, and they'd run to it.
The independent group was working on counting, and had to line up snowman cards in order 1-10, then count that many "snowballs" (cottonballs) by each one.

Spring

Dramatic Play: planting flowers in the sensory table


Blocks: ABC Easter eggs. Each eggs had the capital and lowercase letters, and had an item beginning with that letter inside.


Art: Spring sponge painting


Small Manipulatives: Spring ABC cards and flat marbles from here, Easter bunny and flowers on magnet board



Writing: Easter stickers


Large Group: we read the ABCs of Spring, then went outside searching for signs of Spring.

Small Group: we split into 3 activities, and rotated. One made popcorn blossoms for our tree, another made bird nests for our tree, and the third played a counting game by counting "eggs" into nests with numbers, from here.

Summer

Dramatic Play: a summer beach, with ocean animals and sand with shells. I think 90% of the kids played here the WHOLE time.






Blocks: ABC blocks

Art: marble painting. We've done it in trays this year, where they roll the marbles. Today, we put the papers in old oatmeal containers for them to roll and shake the marbles around. Messy and fun!


Small Manipulatives: horse clothespin matching


Large Group: we read An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell, then made lacing suns. They used a yellow paper plate with holes punched around it, and a yellow piece of yarn tied to it. They could lace around the sides, or across the middle for a cool design, or both.

As they finished their suns, they made a 4 Seasons book. They had to practice cutting a circle, then place the season picture on the right page. Then they got to draw their favorite season.

Happy Easter!

Dramatic Play
We welcomed in spring with a Flower Shop. It's pretty simple, with lots of silk flowers from Dollar Tree. I had used pots with foam blocks in them in the past, but they just broke the foam into pieces and made a mess. So I set this up without them, and decided to add if needed, but they did just fine so I never added them.
They made bouquets for each other, for their mom's and grandma's, and they even built vases out of the blocks in the block center, so we had some beautiful displays over there.


Blocks
Day 1, I had the gymnastics mat out for some large motor play. I also had a bunch of balloons left over from my son's birthday party, so I put them all down there. They were a huge hit. They loved playing "don't let the balloon hit the ground" and passing them together. After one got stuck to the ceiling, we learned about static, and had lots of kids rubbing balloons on their hair in front of the mirror, and sticking them to the walls.

Day 2, I had out the ABC capital/small letter matching eggs, plus an item to go inside each letter. They had fun matching them, filling them, and then hiding them from each other. In fact, I just found a few more setting up our summer stuff, 2 weeks later :)


Art
Marble painting! I used egg shaped paper. They'd put it in the tray, then scoop a marble out of the paint with the spoon, and roll the tray around so the marble could paint their paper. They loved it.

Potato stamps. They're about the shape of an easter egg, so they're perfect for easter pictures. Some had simple designs carved in them, while a few were plain. Most kids didn't just stamp, and smeared them all over their papers.


Small Manipulatives
Easter/Spring magnets

1-10 Easter puzzle from here

E is for Easter mat with flat marbles


Writing
Easter stickers


Snack
We made egg salad to eat on crackers. They each got to peel a boiled egg. It was time-consuming, but it's a great fine motor skill! Then they got to take turns mashing them, and we stirred in mayo and salt. They each got some on their plates to dip their cracker in. All the kids tried it, and more than half liked it and ate it all! That's pretty successful for 4 year olds.

Outside
The sensory table was filled with macaroni and plastic eggs. The eggs somehow became bombs buried in the orchard too. Most remained eggs, but you gotta love their imaginations.
They also just enjoyed the spring weather, playing on the swingset, sandbox, and playhouse.

Large Group
We learned lots of fun new Easter songs. I found this version of Peter Cottontail on youtube to teach them, and all these other videos were there too, so we tried some more. We did the Bunny Hokey Pokey, 10 Little Bunnies, and B-U-N-N-Y. We all loved how fun and active the songs were.

Day 1, we read the book, Best Easter Eggs Ever, and we dyed our boiled eggs using plants. We actually put them in before we read and sang, to give them more time. We used beets, spinach, and grape juice. The grape juice worked the best, spinach the least. It was a fun experiment.

Day 2, we read The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Chick. We then used peeps and other Easter marshmallow candies to make towers with toothpicks. It was a fun engineering project.

Small Group
Miss Kim's group learned more about letter E, capital and small. They used dot markers and these pages to stamp the letter Es. Many of them came home stamped everywhere :) Before you worry, most of the kids followed directions and got the Es. They just can't resist those markers, and proceeded to stamp the rest of their papers. It's preschool, so no biggie!

My group learned about measuring weight with a balance scale, and the words heavier and lighter. I had small eggs filled with different objects. They would hold 2 and guess which was heavier and lighter, then weigh them. After they each had a few turns doing that, they then added eggs to each side until they could get them to balance. They really liked this activity!

Easter

Dramatic Play

I had a hard time thinking of something Easter-related for DP that I had supplies for, so we got out the castle again. They've been asking since Halloween. I had my medieval costumes, like princesses, knights, and a dragon, inside. This was definitely the favorite center of the week!

Art
The first day, we decorated foamie Easter eggs with Easter stickers. They loved this!

The second day, we used potato stamps to make Easter egg pictures. I tried to carve cool designs into the potatoes, and then stamped, they looked like eggs! It was fun.

Small Manips

We played with E is for egg pages and glass beads. They love making patterns with these. There was also a shadow matching game and number puzzles in this Easter pack I downloaded from here.

I found these fun Easter magnets at Dollar Tree that were fun to play with.

We had ABC Easter eggs, where they had to match the capital to the lower case letter, and find the object that went inside. They were great at emptying them out, but when we cleaned up, I made them find the matches and corresponding object and they did awesome working together and finding them all.

Snack
I made rainbow Jello jiggler eggs. They loved peeling apart the colors.

Outside
We played with colored rice in the sensory table. We also just enjoyed the spring warmth! We had bubbles out too and that was a huge hit!

Large Group
Day 1, we read an Easter book, then played a sound matching game with eggs. I filled plastic eggs with different objects, and through shaking and listening, we found their matches.
In small group time, we went back to our feelings theme from last week, and read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss. I gave them each a piece of paper and a paper cut out person and they got to choose which color from the book matched their mood for the day and paint their picture and person. The original plan had been to peel off the person to leave its mark on the paper, but that didn't work out. For many of them, the person (although I taped it underneath) moved a lot so underneath was not a person outline. For the ones who had a great outline, I didn't get the person off on time! We were cleaning up and trying to leave on time, I forgot to peel the people. I remembered after school, but they had dried and were stuck on. It still worked out fine, and they enjoyed the process and learned the lesson about different moods.

Day 2, we made Easter sculptures. This really tested our creativity, problem solving skills, and small motor skills. They had fun using toothpicks, and different Easter candies and marshmallows to build their sculpture. When it tipped, or fell, they'd have to figure out how to fix it and I saw some great problem solving happen.
We also reviewed patterns with Easter pictures.