Favorites week!

I didn't get pics of it all, but here's what your kids chose as their favorite things to do from the school year:

Dramatic Play

Camping

House/babies

Pizza Restaurant

Doctor's Office

Blocks

Bowling

Magnatiles (this was actually on the shelf for the full 2 weeks, and was off the shelf and being used constantly these 2 weeks. If I had to pick 1 favorite toy of the class this year, this is it, hands down! If you're ever considering a toy for your child for birthdays or Christmas, this is a great one!! It never grows old. And they can be so creative with it. I got my set of 100 on Zulily for $19 a few years back, no joke. They can be pricey, so watch for deals! They are SO worth it.)

Bristle Blocks

Number Pegs

Car mat and cars

Toy castle

Small Manipulatives

Lacing ABCs

Lacing cards

Small magnets (balls, sticks)...no idea what they're called ;)

Puppet theater

Reading Center
They requested all the stuffed animals come down from the cupboard, so they were added, along with some of my favorite books!


Art

Painting in many different ways!
-spin art
-marble painting
-roller painting

2 snack preps, then art...they love cooking! They made mummy hot dogs, a request they remembered from Halloween. And we also made cookies for the last day.

Slime
This technically wasn't a favorite they'd chosen, but apparently slime making went viral this year, so I hadn't been able to find glitter glue all year to make it, and finally had a good reason to do it! It was a big hit.

Many kids asked for the recipe. I don't use an exact one, but if you google elmer's glue and borax slime recipes, they'll get more specific. I was using 6 bottles of glue, and you don't just times the recipe by 6, so that's why it's not exact. I pour in the glue, add a bottle or 2 of water and mix it in. Then I added a spoonful of borax to a couple of cups of warm water and stirred until it dissolved. I added it to the glue as I stirred and stopped when it felt like enough. It was actually too wet, and I had to pour some water off. I also added a little more borax water, as it was too sticky. That's why my recipes aren't exact :) You can store it in a ziploc bag in the fridge.

Snack
The kids voted for their favorite snack, which they all just wanted popsicles. So I convinced them to pick 3 more for the other days.
We made mummy hot dogs, which were just hot dogs wrapped in crescent rolls.
We had goldfish crackers and juice.
We made chocolate chip cookies. Some of you requested that recipe, so here it is:

2 cups butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 large packages vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
4 3/4 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
4 cups chocolate chips (we did half peanut butter chips)

Cream butter, sugars
Beat in pudding
Stir in eggs and vanilla
Blend in flour and baking soda
Stir in chocolate chips

Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes

Large Group/Small Group

We read some of my favorite books, that don't necessarily fit in a theme, but I just love to read. We practiced the songs we had chosen to sing to our parents. We wrote in our journals about our favorite preschool moments. We drew self portraits to compare to the self portraits we had drawn at the beginning of the year. We played ABC bingo and put together rhyming puzzles. We made potions-this was most important to the class! Good old-fashioned baking soda and vinegar, made magic with some dish soap, food coloring, and test tubes to mix them in. And we also took a fun field trip to visit some chickens, and play in a different yard! We really had a fun 2 weeks playing!!



Thank you for a great year! I will get pictures up soon on dropbox and email you, so you can download the ones you want. We seriously had so much fun this year. I am excited to have most of you back next year! Have a great summer!! We'll be working hard on finishing the yard, so we'll have some gorgeous green grass to run on! Thanks for your patience with our construction this spring.

4 Seasons Review

This was a really fun 2 weeks, reviewing the seasons. If I can say they really learned anything all year, it's about the seasons! We talked and sang about them every day, plus already had a week in depth about each one. We took these 4 days, and each day was about 1 of the seasons. They had fun seeing old things come back too.

Fall
Dramatic play all week was camping, because it's the only way I could think to change all 4 seasons and show it each day. So we started with a tent covered in orange leaves, and other fall leaves scattered all over the ground. I didn't take pictures any of the days, but it's a repeat from our fall week here.
And if you looked there, you'll see the other fun things I brought back, like the fall pattern cards and apple tree counting cards.

Winter
The leaves were gone around the tent, and instead there were white sheets for snow, plus reindeer and polar bears. Similar to here. I also brought back the fake snow with the polar animals in it and that was the favorite for the day. Did I ever mention I found some at Dollar Tree this winter? Mine is from Steve Spangler's site, but for a small amount, the dollar store would be the way to go.

Spring
The tent was now surrounded by spring flowers. I brought out the road mat in the blocks area with the cars, and that was the hit of the day. Just starting Favorites week a little early. We also did spring sponge painting in art with flower and bug sponges. We learned about the water cycle too and watched boiling water turn to steam, and also filled cotton balls with water, then watched them "rain." We sang the water cycle song and learned the big words evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

Summer
We totally lucked out with a hot day in the 90s this day! I planned the water party to be this day, knowing it may change with the weather, and I'm thrilled we had the only hot day of the whole month! We weren't inside long, since they were so excited to get outside. We cleaned up early, ate snack fast, then whizzed through large group to get ourselves outside and enjoying the sunshine! I had 2 small wading pools, plus the sensory table filled with water. There was a sprinkler going, plus I made some big batches of bubbles. There were fish toys and rubber ducks in the pools too. The sensory table had cups and scoops and bottles to play with. We had a great time, running around crazy from thing to thing, and I'm so glad for the warm weather!

4 Seasons book
Each day in large group we did a page in our 4 Seasons book. The words are from the song, Round and Round the Seasons Go that we sang each day (that way, they can go home and read it to their families). Here's each page:
Fall: tissue paper painted with liquid starch
 
Winter: glue and glitter for snow (could have done on darker paper, but I like them to all be the same)


 
Spring: split peas glued on like leaf buds (one girl was so precise and exact and it looks awesome)
 
 
Summer: green paint for full leaves. Their favorite one. They could not stop painting.

I always offered crayons first if they wanted to color the trees brown, or add a scene. Many added flowers in the spring and a sun for the winter and they sometimes colored their trees, but they were all more into the new thing we were going to add.

 Want to make a book for your preschoolers or kiddos? There are so many possibilities for each season, and here's your pages to download and print, easy peasy!
Click here to download.
I also printed out a cover and then stapled the books together. I bound them in Kinder because I had access to the equipment and supplies for free, and that's another great option.

Fall

I love fall! I had a fun week teaching your kids all about it too. I see light bulbs turning on in their little minds and they're really understanding the things we talk about. I hope they're pointing out signs of fall that they're seeing to you too! The trees in our neighborhood are still pretty green, but we could see the bright colors on the mountain on our walk, and found many more trees just starting to change and lose their leaves.

Fall Math

 Apple tree counting. I printed the tree mats from Kelly's Kindergarten and laminated them years ago. They've survived many years already! I got the "apples" from Dollar Tree. They're just a berry bunch that I cut up and they look like apples. I store them in baby food containers. I also added acorns that we found a family walk last week. They loved that they were real acorns! The kids can look at the number on the basket and count how many apples or acorns to put in the tree.

 Fall patterns. I bought these pattern sets in a Scholastic book order a few years back. I love that they come with pattern cards. At this age, just matching the object to the picture on the card is a great beginning math skill. They were definitely doing that today! It helps reinforce colors too. One girl had to get creative because she was making a pattern that needed yellow squirrels, but the other kids had them. She replaced the squirrels with yellow leaves and made a great pattern! I helped them extend their play by helping them extend their patterns. We only did these simple AB patterns today:

 Here are some harder patterns, like ABC, that we will start getting into once they can all extend an AB pattern:

 I was surprised how popular these fall pattern toys were today. They also enjoyed just playing with them on their own, and some made their own patterns too (see the apple pattern at the top).

For snack this week, we had apples since it's fall! On Monday we tasted fresh apple slices. We had red, green, and yellow. When they each finished, they colored an apple to show which was their favorite and then hung it in the tree. When everyone was done, we counted our results on our "graph." 3 liked red, 2 liked yellow, and 1 liked green. I was glad they didn't all copy the first person and they each chose their real favorite!

Fall Art

 

We changed our tree this week too! Thanks to a parent helper on Monday, we painted our fall leaves. This has been a favorite art project of mine as long as I've been teaching. We painted with corn syrup. The kids got to choose red, yellow, or orange and we added the food coloring to their corn syrup on their leaf and they got to paint. Since there isn't orange food coloring, we learned that red and yellow mixed together make orange. They've been drying since Monday and were ready to hang this morning. The kids kept commenting on how pretty our fall tree looked. I have to agree! A few leaves even fell and they said it was like a real fall tree. I knew they'd been listening this week! I'll have to figure out a way to attach some of the heavier leaves. Here's a close-up of our shiny leaves:

 Today we did another fall art project, starch painting. The kids got to choose a fall picture printed on cardstock to paint. They added tissue paper squares in fall colors. They then paint over it with liquid starch. The starch makes the tissue paper bleed and stick. Some just enjoyed painting with a lot of starch because it was turning colors in our bowls.

 You'll notice I don't do a lot of "crafts" in preschool. Crafts teach a child to copy and follow directions and that's great, but our goal in art is to learn creativity. Even this week is a little tough for me to have ready-printed pictures that they're painting. I don't do that often. I love to see them explore and create whatever comes to mind with the mediums they are given to create with.

Fall Dramatic Play

 

We went camping in Dramatic Play this week. I honestly couldn't think of a fall-related dramatic play. Fall just makes me think of leaves changing, and the mountains, so that's why we went camping! A few leaves on the ground made it relate to our week.

Roasting marshmallows was the highlight of this area all week. It's just cotton balls glued onto dowels we had in our kitchen for years.

I was pretty proud of my creative grill I made. It's a cooling rack on a paper tray. They seemed less than  impressed.

 

 I found all the food cooking in the fire. Makes sense. Wish I'd thought of it!