On Tuesday we celebrated Valentine’s Day with a card swap and yummy cupcakes. The children also enjoyed making “Love Bugs” and heart shaped crayons. The heart shaped crayons were a huge hit. The children LOVED this activity and they came out great. Each one was unique and beautiful.
Directions for activity if you want to try at home:
Peel/break up old crayons
Place in silicone baking tray (6-8 crayons each)
Cook in oven @ 230 degrees for about 15 minutes (or until crayons have completely melted)
Let cool (we put ours outside to speed this process up) and the crayons will easily pop out!
This week we enjoyed singing “Skidamarink” and “Tony Chestnut”. We also had a lot of fun listening to the William Tell story/music on Thursday, retelling it with the felt board and acting it out.
Stories we enjoyed this week included: Ten Little Ducks, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, The Very Quiet Cricket, Puff the Magic Dragon, The Art Lesson and Owl Moon. We are getting very good at identifying what an author does and what an illustrator does. Ask your child and see if they can remember! Also when your reading with them have them show you where the title page is in their books.
Work time was very busy this week! Many of our younger children worked on identifying and writing their names. We have been busy counting 1-10 and working on longest/shortest with the Red Rods and the Number Rods. We’ve also been working on rhyming, phonetic sounds, geometric shapes, pouring, scooping, sorting and making beautiful play dough creations.
Kindergarten has been busy reading, building/writing words, playing the Bank Game with the bead material, doing the Long Chains, working on telling time and making a class graph of our favorite Goldfish crackers. We had every child (and teacher!) sample regular flavor, rainbow and pizza flavored Goldfish. We tallied up the votes and made a graph. I believe pizza flavor was the winner, although it was close!
What a busy week we had at Sunnybrook!
On Tuesday we enjoyed a Spanish lesson with Zeanny. The children really enjoyed singing, “Cinco Patitos” using the ducks on the felt board. We also played a game to learn the Spanish names for some of our musical instruments.
We enjoyed reading a few of Mo Willems books this week including, The Pigeon Finds a Hotdog and Knuffle Bunny. Our afternoon students have been learning about fables and Tammy has been reading some of Aesop Fables at afternoon circle. On Thursday we enjoyed reading The Rabbit and the Turtle: Aesop Fables by Eric Carle.
On Wednesday many of our students enjoyed sharing their books, stuffed toys and music CD’s to tell us about their favorite story character. Each child took a turn standing up in front of the classroom and telling us what they brought, one special thing about it and then they got to answer two questions from their friends.
On Thursday we welcomed Winnie the Pooh from Believe in Books. They shared a story with us and gave each child a story to bring home. It was a great time!
We’ve also been very busy with our work! We enjoyed a variety of Valentine’s Day inspired activities and many of the children were busy working on math, language and sensorial activities.
Our Friday students made beautiful Arctic animal dioramas, worked on telling time to the hour and did a great job reading, Dinah Dinosaur and Monkey Trouble and then writing their own Dinah Dinosaur story.
Pin-punching hearts
Stringing beads onto pipe cleaner to make Valentine’s Day bracelets
Brown Bear, Brown Bear felt board
Bead Material with cards
Slowly, but surely we are making progress on our igloo. We still need a few more jugs…keep bringing them in!
Reminder:
Tuesday, February 14th we will have a Valentine’s Day celebration/card swap during morning circle. Check your email for student’s names.
This week we learned that an author writes books and an illustrator creates the artwork in books. We found the front and back cover on our books and learned to recognize the title page. We discussed fiction and non-fiction and enjoyed many stories such as: The Mitten, The Mixed-Up Chameleon, The Very Busy Spider, How Groundhog’s Garden Grew, All About Turtles, The Musician’s of the Sun and The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
We talked about Groundhog’s Day and some of the children colored and cut out a groundhog, painted cups brown and cut a hole in the bottom. We glued a Popsicle stick to the groundhog and they were able to “pop” out of their hole.
On Wednesday Tammy helped the afternoon children make an Native American talking stick. The rule was that only the person who had the stick was allowed to speak. We practiced it Thursday morning at circle. The child holding the stick said one thing they liked about themselves and then said one thing they like about the child sitting next to them. It was great practice in taking turns speaking and it was sweet to hear the children compliment one another. My favorite was, “I like you because I just love you!”
During music we enjoyed moving to a couple of Hap Palmer songs, singing “We’re Going to Kentucky”, “BINGO” and many other requests.
Our Kindergarten is working on graphs. We are keeping track of the weather each day (that we are in school) during the month of February so that we can make a weather graph. So far the have made graph’s showing the class preference between walruses and polar bears and counted groundhogs with and without shadows on a groundhog day worksheet.
On Friday we enjoyed listening to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and making Beethoven booklets. We also had a lot of fun sledding on the hill at Colonel town.
Thank you families, for the sled donations and for remembering to bring in your milk jugs!
Reminders:
Milk Jugs! Keep them coming…the igloo has been started.
Show and Tell on Wednesday, February 8th. Please have your child bring in a favorite story book character item (a book, figurine, poster, plush toy, etc)
Thursday, February 9th: Believe in Books in visiting with Winnie the Pooh!
This week we had a great time learning about Chinese New Year!
We read The Runaway Wok which the children really enjoyed. We learned that Chinese New Year is a celebration of spring and and is celebrated with family gatherings, gift giving and eating symbolic foods and plenty of festive decorations. We enjoyed making paper Chinese lanterns on Wednesday and many of the children made Chinese New Year books with dragons, lanterns, fireworks. Many of them pin punched China from the geography map and we helped our younger students trace it into their booklets.
Since it is the year of the dragon, our afternoon students worked together to decorate their own Chinese New Year dragon. It is ready for the festivities with plenty of color, glitter, feather, ribbons and even a few bells!
On Tuesday we had a great Spanish lesson and enjoyed using the felt board with our Very Hungry Caterpillar felt pieces during circle.
At music we’ve been talking about percussion instruments. We listened to a drumming CD and enjoyed playing different beats on our African drums. We also experimented with maracas, rhythm sticks and triangles.
Do you play an instrument? We are hoping to learn about different instruments and instrument families over the next couple months. If you play an instrument we invite you in to share your talent with the students.
