As the winter solstice approaches, the days are getting shorter and colder. We turned off the lights and used a flashlight to shine through the pages of a story to see where different animals go in the winter. We introduced the shadow puppet theater then Monday students drew, cut out, and attached their own shadow puppets to sticks, then used them in the theater. They continued to create and play with shadow puppets throughout the week.
The children continued working on their costumes for Woodland Stone Soup, which will be delayed until after break. There were lots of buzzing bees and animal adventures to give the costumes a trial run.
During sign with Rose we practiced the ABC’s and our sign names, as well as our song The More We Get Together. Rose then introduced some seasonal signs, including snow, skiing, sledding, Merry Christmas, winter, and cold.
The kindergarten students did some number rod work. First they built all the numbers from 1-20 using the 10 rod and 1’s, recording their work by tracing the rod and 1 cubes then writing the corresponding number. They also used the number rods to do 5 addition work. They were each given a sheet with five tracings of a 5 rod, then tasked with building 5 equations and recording the number sentence.
Pajama day was lots of fun with many activities to choose from. Children made snowflakes using pipecleaners and beads. They created then repeated the pattern for each of the 6 snowflake branches, making it symmetrical.
They had fun building and playing under the big tent and in the box forts. And dancing like ballerinas in the Nutcracker just like Lyn’s niece, Hannah.
They created some snowy snowman pictures.
And they did some festive winter holiday stamping.
We celebrated a fourth birthday with the smiling birthday girl. She donated one of her favorite stories, Llama, Llama, Holiday Drama, which we enjoyed reading before she walked the globe around the sun four times. Happy Birthday newest four year old!
The children found lots of fun ways to spend their indoor and outdoor time this week. Thank you to Rose for the new big blue sled, which was a very popular new tool in our snowy yard.
Friday students read, talked about, and acted out what different animals do in the winter. They migrated south as birds, munched on berries, grubs, grasses and nuts to fatten up for winter then went to sleep as bears, and they hopped to the best spot at the bottom of the pond to hibernate as frogs. We learned about adaptation, the way snowshoe hares and some other animals will shed their coats of brown hair from the summer and fall and grow in white hair for the winter so they continue to blend into their surroundings. The children then looked around the classroom to see what colors would be good camouflage for our environment then colored some hares to blend in. The children hid their hares around the room in places they would be difficult to spot, then they went on the hunt as foxes and coyotes. As predators they used their eyes to search out and “eat” hidden prey.
