Ringing in Spring

Back in early fall when I began this blog, I envisioned great things. The hope was to update each week or at least each month about the progress in my classroom. I started off on a good foot, but then winter happened...DUN, DUN, DUNNNN. Okay, really life hasn't been all that dramatic. The problem is my kiddos and I missed quite a bit of school this winter, so I really did not have too many new things to share. Some weeks my classes (I have 2 on alternating days) would only get one day of school a week. Therefore I reused many things until they got the concept being taught.
 Enough gloom and doom for now. Spring is here, and brand new things are in bloom! Here is a look at some spring time events going on in March. As of now they have a St. Patrick's Day focus. One fun tradition at our school is hunting for the leprechaun.  The week before the 17th, my director will play tricks on the kids while they are at recess. (i.e. steal our gold, mess the room up, leave foot prints, etc). The kids love it! They enjoyed hiding our gold and searching for it if it went missing. They walk through the hallways so quietly trying to find the sneaky little guy. What fun!

St. Paddy's Day also provides many learning opportunities. Lucky Charms has been a big deal of late. In fact we made Lucky Charm treats the other day to practice our measuring skills. They were a tasty treat! The kids also love playing with the cereal in the sand & water table. I always tell my kids that the food in our learning centers is full of yucky germs, so they do a great job of not eating the food set aside for play.

I used St. Patrick's Day as an opportunity to teach about the rainbow. As a literacy activity, I used Fruit Loops and a rainbow letter map to have the children match up the correct color on the correct spot. The print outs I used came from KidsSoup.

I left a felt board on the science table and did my best to cut out rainbow shapes of each color. Based on the material I had left, it didn't turn out great. However, the kids enjoyed using it, so it served its purpose. You can also see where that tricky leprechaun visited us.

While looking around for ideas on Pinterest one day, I came across a Pot'O Gold activity.I didn't have the materials on hand to put together the learning center, so I improvised. I also made mine a math center instead of the letter O idea it had been intended. Instead of giving each pot of gold (a black paper cup from the dollar store) it's own individual rainbow, I constructed a rainbow from party streamers and tape. I used pink in place of orange since that is what I had. I searched and searched and searched for candy or play gold coins, but I finally settled on gold Dove chocolates and Butterfinger chocolate egg candies as my gold. I took clothespins numbered 1-20 that the children could clip onto the cup and place that much gold under the rainbow. The rainbow really helped attract the kids to the table. This was also the pot of gold we would hide each day.

We reinforced our skills of rainbow colors with a craft for each class. Some projects did get out of order a little bit depending on how much space the children allowed as we worked, but they did know where it should go. ;-) Here is a leprechaun hat streamer rainbow and a paper plate collage.

Some other learning activities included graphing Lucky Charm marshmallows. You can find plenty of graphs online. I never did get a chance to let them color their findings, but the sorting and counting gave them plenty of practice. The classes also got a chance to practice writing their letters in leprechaun goo (hair gel and green food coloring in a plastic baggie). Be sure to tape your baggie on ALL 4 SIDES. I should have known better, but you live and learn. Thankfully it is fairly easy clean up if the worst should happen.

We also had some shamrock fun. I placed dots on the shamrocks and the children had to match a rainbow stick with the corresponding number to the correct shamrock. I also wrote the lowercase letters on one side and they matched it to the uppercase letter on our circle time carpet.

That's about it for now. Hopefully the snow is about gone, and I will have lots of new spring activities to share. We are also ready to get outdoors some more and have some fun!

Apple Theme Fun

Fall is a wonderful time of year! I love the weather this time of year and the beautiful colors. As a teacher, I love it even more for the many, many themes fall offers. This year to kick off the start of a new school year, we chose an apple theme for September. Here are just a few ideas I came across over the past couple weeks:

My personal favorite was teaching the children the parts of the apple. I wanted to do more than just a poster printed off the computer. When researching teaching ideas, I saw an adorable "Parts of the Apple" display on a Google images search using a pocket chart. It was then I remembered my brother had fixed my flannel graph board. This inspired me to use felt to teach the parts of the apple. As suggested by my director, I printed off labels and used Velcro so they would stick. The children had so much fun helping me stick up the pieces and labels each day. They picked up the scientific names very quickly!

I used a worksheet from KidSoup to reinforce the apple parts. I could not find one with the names already on the paper, so I just made my own dotted words for the children to trace. Not only were they practicing the parts of the apple, but we were honing in on those writing skills.

We went right from parts of the apple to the life cycle of an apple tree. Many may be familiar with the finger play "Eat an apple, save the core, plant the seeds and grow some more." Thanks to Pinterest, one of my classes made these. I had extra black beans left over that the children glued, and I reinforced with packing tape.

The reason I had so many black beans on hand was thanks to an idea I was led to on No Time for Flashcards' facebook page. The idea led to some great one-to-one correspondence as well as pre-writing skills with that pincer grasp. The cookie sheets came from Wal-Mart, a 97 cent find!

Another Pinterest inspired idea was an apple taste test. The first letter I introduced my students to was the letter M, so I called it the Apple Mmm Test. I provided each child a plate with an applesauce MUFFIN(that they helped me MIX & MEASURE the class day before), apple jelly & apple cinnamon cheerios with a cup of apple juice. I provided each child with a stack of pre-cut colored apples. They followed my instructions about what to eat. As they tasted the food they brought the proper color to put on the graph if they liked the treat. After everything was finished, we compared the results.

I decided to celebrate Johnny Appleseed Day with the class as a bit of a special event. I wanted to go outside and play a group game for something different. When I looked up ideas online, I was not finding anything fitted with what I wanted to accomplish. Finally I settled on planning my own relay. I took 2 pans from the children's play kitchen set and got 2 fake apples. The children were instructed to place a hand behind their back, and hold the pan with the apple in it in the other. We reviewed how Johnny Appleseed wore a pot on his head and planted apple trees. It took a while for them to figure out how a relay race works, but they had a lot of fun trying.

Another idea I found one a random web search was using paper bags as your basket which turned into a fun letter sorting activity for the children:

I also enjoyed this idea from Teach Preschool. The kids really loved scrunching up their paper for their paint brush. I wanted to see how their imaginations worked, so some of these trees looked quite interesting. Some of the children really did a good idea of dabbing their ball into the paint and stamping it onto the paper, and some of the children rubbed their paint ball all over the place. I enjoyed seeing all of their trees.

To leave off, I haven't needed my whiteboard for anything yet, so here's what I came up with to keep the room looking exciting:

Another big hit was making these little guys. The sad thing was when it came time to eat the pie, many of the kids said they did not like pie. However, they had so much fun mixing the ingredients together and helping with the measurements. I also now have an awesome recipe for Thanksgiving!

That's what I have to share about my first Apple Theme. Looking forward to many fall fun themes in the weeks to come!