S is for Squirrel

I am a little behind in what's been going on in the classroom. So I must back up to last week. September was all about apples, and now October & November are about fall fun. I began our study of fall with squirrels. The letter S is next in the curriculum I use, so I thought squirrels would be a fun & fitting study.

I must admit I was a little discouraged about finding things for our furry friends, so this post may be a bit short. All week we worked on the "Gray Squirrel, Gray Squirrel" fingerplay. The kids loved swishing their bushing tails. We also learned that squirrels say hello with their noses. With this in mind and a few friendly suggestions from my director, I came up with this craft for the kiddos.

 The squirrel template came from a different school craft on KidsSoup. Instead of using it in a painting project, I traced the squirrels on gray paper. The children cut them out. They were instructed to pull apart cotton balls (for those fine motor building skills) and glue them to the tail. They also applied an eye and fuzzy nose. To keep the bushing tail matching, they squeezed glue onto the tail and my assistant and I helped them put glitter on the tail. They turned out really cute!

Here are 2 of our furry friends saying hello

This year at my school we are teaching the children the fruits of the spirit. October's theme in kindness, so I was able to come up with a math activity that led to kindness. Though we lack oak trees at the school, we have plenty of chestnut trees. At the beginning of the week, I took the children outside to collect lots of chestnuts. I had to pry them out of their prickly outer shell with a stick to prevent injury, but we still managed to come up with a lot. I had the KidsSoup squirrel and number activity printed out, and the kids enjoyed practicing number recognition and counting with the chestnuts.

At the end of the week I passed out the numbers. Together we named the numbers, and each child had a chance to count out their number of chestnuts. To practice kindness, each child took their chestnuts and placed them in Gatorade bottles for the Tot Time (1 yrs) class. Now their fun activity will be used as a sensory bottle for youngsters. They had lots of fun with this activity.

To end the week we played "Hide the Nut." One child would place the nut under their chair (nest) and I would instruct another child to steal it. I would then say, "Little Squirrel sitting on your nest, who took your nut, what is your guess?" The child would then guess until they got the right answer. It was good practice in following directions as many excited lips wanted to give away the answer.

  We had a fun squirrel week, but these were the highlights!