Our Senses

One of our December units was "Our Senses."  These are some of the activities we participated in to help us learn about the parts of our bodies we use to learn about the world around us:

We used our sense of hearing to play "Sound Bingo,"

we listened to our snack "snap, crackle, and pop,"

we experimented with rubber bands to learn about vibration/sound,

and we learned about high/low tones by experimenting with different levels of water in glasses.  We tapped the glasses to hear the different tones made by the different amounts of colored water, colored corresponding paper glasses and glued them on to a paper strip to make songs, then "played" the songs we created!

We used our hands and our sense of touch to match shapes with their outlines,

and had fun making and playing with "slime."

We did learn about the other senses, but my camera was missing in action for those days :)



Holiday Family Fun Night

On December 5th we held our first annual Holiday Family Fun Night.  The turnout was great!  Our morning class, along with Miss Alison's Rock River morning ARC afternoon classes, put on a short program for all the parents/grandparents, then participated in several fun family activities.

We decorated Christmas trees,

Decorated Christmas cookies,

Played with Playdough,

Played a "Snowball Toss" game,

and  enjoyed "Pin the Tail on Frosty."



Family Fun night was a hit!

December 2, 2011

Today we finished up our "Our Bodies" theme.  On Wednesday, we learned how our bodies grow and change throughout our lives.  We brought in our baby pictures and had fun trying to guess who each baby was!  We also compared our baby pictures with more recent pictures of ourselves.  Today we focused on ways to keep our bodies healthy.  We talked about staying clean, wearing our seatbelts and helmets, eating healthy food, getting lots of sleep.  We took turns adding a cup of water to either the "tub" or "shower" side of our balancing scale to see which method of getting clean our class prefered.  It turned out we were actually split down the middle!

Mrs. Greenfield put a special lotion with red "germs" on her hands then shook our hands and had us shake each other's hands to see how easily germs spread. 

We watched her wash her "germy " hands in the sink without using soap and saw that most of the germs were still there.  Then we saw how washing long enough to sing "Happy Birthday" and using soap got all the "germs" off!  We were all happy to get all our germs off our hands too.

Since it is the beginning of December, we also made a Santa Christmas Countdown Calendar.  We need to cut off one section from Santa's body each day, then when we get to the top, it will be Christmas!

We also had fun calling for pizza delivery, calling the doctor, calling ourselves and our friends using our new class phone book and play phone.

Next week's newsletter will be coming home on Monday.  It will tell you that when you arrive Monday evening for the Holiday Family Fun Night, you are asked to please bring your child down to the classroom then to wait for the program part of the event to begin in the church sanctuary.  If you have said you would bring a snack drink for the event, please feel free to either send it along with your child to school Monday or just bring it with you when you come to the event.  We've been practicing hard and are very excited for Monday!



November 28, 2011

Today we started our "Our Bodies" unit. 

We started the day tracing letters and shapes,

then we talked about the amazing bodies we have and about some of their parts.  Mrs. Tenpas and Mrs. Greenfield traced our bodies

and we had fun decorating them to look like us! 

We read books about our bodies and their parts/systems and looked at a big picture of our insides.  Most of thought this was really fun, a few thought it was really gross:)

We fed our bodies a healthy snack of apples and animal crackers. 

See how this healthy food makes us smile!

We're looking forward to learning more about our bodies!









Thanksgiving

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We sure had fun learning about the holiday in 4K. 

We learned about how the Pilgrims came to this country in the Mayflower and were helped by the Native Americans who already lived here.  We learned that some of the Native Americans used trading beads and we made our own trading bead necklaces.

We made a turkey project that was fun but a LOT of work for us!

The highlight of the week was our Thanksgiving Feast.  We dressed in the Pilgrim/Indian costumes we made and enjoyed tasting many  different traditional Thanksgiving foods.  We all did a great job trying new thing and using our best manners!  Happy Thanksgiving!!

Our Families

Our Families was a theme the kids really seemed to enjoy.  They had fun showing the class pictures of their family members and telling us all about them.

We talked about the things our families like to eat and do and made family shields depicting different things about our families.

When we played in centers we did a lot of pretending that we were moms and dads, brothers and sisters.  We especially liked bathing our babies!

We took a few minutes out to sing some songs for the members of the Golden Lifers Bible Study at the church.  We told them our first and last names (we practiced that!) and did a great job singing for the grandpas and grandmas.

The kids liked seeing pictures of my family as well, especially the youngest member :)



Shapes Week

We learned all about the shapes in our world during our Shapes theme. 

We learned how to draw shapes and practiced doing that in lots of fun ways,

We made shape pictures using pattern blocks,

We made shape necklaces,

We had lots of fun dancing to different shape music & movement songs,

We sorted shapes by their attributes,

We learned a fun shape/alphabet song and practiced drawing shapes in the air,



and we played fun shape games.

We also enjoyed reading the book Mouse Shapes  and had fun making shape collages like the mice in the book did.

Our favorite activity was when we went for a walk around the neighborhood looking for different shapes.  We took pictures of those shapes and have spent a lot of time looking at those pictures on our Math and Science Center wall!