Good Golly, it's letter G

 We had a new sensory play experience this week, just for the letter Gg: ghost dough!  I found the idea at http://www.growingajeweledrose.com, and knew the kiddos would love it!  I put some baking soda into a pie pan for them, added some shaving cream, and they mixed and formed it and squished it around.  There were buttons and beads to add to create ghostly faces.  The kiddos really enjoyed it, but I think the pie plates were limiting.  I think next year we'll put it directly on the table!

 BOO!

One of my all time favorite stories for kiddos is Go Away Big Green Monster, by Ed Emberly.  Each year we read the book, and as a follow up, make our own monsters.  The kiddos squish green paint in the fold of heavy paper to create the symmetrical face, then add the features right into the wet paint as we retell the story together.  Each monster seems to have it's own unique personality!

 

Another annual event is taking our photos with chocolate googly eyes.  We'll make a book with photos of everyone showing their googly eyed faces, with the simple text, "____ has googly eyes."  Again, the kids LOVE it!

 We make graphs several times a week, and this was no exception.  As you can see, giraffes were a fave this week, maybe because we had just finished making our hand print giraffes when we did this graph.

Here's a math manipulative for the letter Gg: geoboards.   We pull these out some days after lunch, in between taking turns in the bathroom.  The children stretch rubber bands over the pegs on the board to form various shapes.  (Several kiddos made parallel lines this time, so you may hear a new vocabulary word if you ask your child about it.)

 We also had a fantastic field trip to Mrs. Lowes' Farm this week.  If we'd gone last week, I would have emphasized the /f/ sound of farm, and if it was next week, we would have focused on /h/ for hayride.  We did get to see, pat and feed goats, but truly, what the kiddos will remember is touching the many animals, playing farm themed games, and the hayride.  They were so gentle, and enjoyed the farm so much, we will definitely go back again next fall!

 

 Something I am trying to focus on more this year, is doing more art with the children.  You can see more of our artwork in our school gallery at our Artsonia.com gallery.  Each child chose to make either a ghost or a giraffe hand print, and we all made gumball machines.

  This is one of my new art projects, and it came from http://onecrayolashort.blogspot.com.  Wayne Thiebaud is an American artist who frequently painted dessert items.  This project is inspired by his Three Machines.

 We had a second field trip this week; we went to Green's Produce for gourds - which is another fancy word for pumpkins.  Did you know pumpkins are not always orange, or round, or smooth?  We saw bumpy pumpkins, flat ones, long ones, green ones, white ones, some with red and green, some pink ones... there are a LOT of different kinds!  We bought 6 cool ones to decorate our entrance with, and a dozen little ones for the kiddos to decorate next week.  My favorite thing about the pumpkins is cooking and eating them!  After Halloween, I will start baking pumpkins, making pumpkin puree with the flesh, and freezing it ready for our pumpkin cooking.  I'll make plenty of pumpkin muffins, pumpkin smoothies, pumpkin soup, and pumpkin pies for us to eat at school during the winter months, and the children will each make their own pumpkin pie to take home for Thanksgiving.  Our pumpkins are well loved!  With crazy amounts of vitamin A, C, fiber and minerals, they are a healthy addition to our meals too!

 

This last activity has nothing to do with the letter Gg, but was such a hit, I have to share it with you.  I've been incorporating more sensory play into my curriculum this year, and found this one at http://www.growingajeweledrose.com.  This is Eucalyptus scented pasta.  So many of us are experiencing allergies right now, and when I saw the idea, I knew the scent would help clear our noses.  I just happened to have Eucalyptus oil on hand, so I made up a batch.  The cardboard slides were packing in a box recently, which I kept, knowing they would be good for something fun.  We rolled large acorns, which we collected at the zoo last week, down the slides with the pasta, and had an awesome time.  This kind of play is great for developing fine motor skills, cooperating with friends, experiencing different textures and scents, and the repetitive nature of the play is soothing and calming.  The children went back to this activity over and over.  I think next week I'll add some Halloween themed items to make it new all over again!

Fun with letter Ff

One of the very important subject to cover for the letter Ff is fire safety.  

Each month, when we do our fire drill, we start by going over the 3 things necessary for a fire: fuel, a spark, and oxygen.  I light a candle in a jar, and then put on the lid, and we count how many seconds it takes for the fire to go out.  The kiddos know that without oxygen in the air, a fire will be smothered and go out.  

Next we practice our stop, drop, and roll drill.  If our clothes ever catch on fire, we would definitely want the fire to go out, so we smother it by pushing it into the ground where it can't get any oxygen.  An adult might help smother the fire with a blanket or pillow, but they might get burned helping out, so kids don't do that.  See how we cover our eyes to protect them?

 We check out our fire extinguisher, to make sure it is charged and ready, just in case we ever need it.

 We practice lining up quickly, ready to exit, and one of the teachers takes the sign in sheet with us, so we can check that everyone is out safely.  This is a time to be quiet, so we can hear any instructions our teachers give us!

 We walk quickly to the mail box - that's our meeting place in an emergency.  Here the kiddos are telling me where they see people.  If there was a real fire, we would need to find someone to call 911 for help.

Another day, I took some of the kiddos on a field trip to the Botanic Gardens.  We saw so many awesome things!  Flowers...

 foot prints...

 we even stopped in a comfy place to draw and write about what we were seeing.

 There is a beautiful fountain in a pond, so we stopped a while to watch the turtles in the water.

 Back at home we heard the story of Rainbow Fish, and even saw a short video of the book, then we painted our own plaster rainbow fish.

 Cleaning the table is as much fun as the painting is when we use shaving cream!

We added silver glitter as a finishing touch.

Here are some of our finished fish.

 

On Thursday, we made Friendship Fruit Salad for snack.  Each child brought a piece of fruit from home to contribute, and we graphed the different kinds of fruit that came in.  We also graphed which day each child brought their fruit.

We all helped to make the fruit salad. The kiddos rinsed...

cut...

(look how we make our fingers into a tent over the knife, to keep them away from the cutting edge.  You have to watch those butter knives, you know!)

...and finally tossed (literally!) the fruit in the bowl. So was it any good?

 Well, we had a first serving... then seconds, thirds, fourths and even fifth servings!  The kiddos LOVED the friendship fruit salad!  Yummy yummy!

E is for elephants and eggs

E is definitely for elephant!  We are very lucky to be close to the Fort Worth Zoo, where there are hundreds of amazing animals.  Every year we buy season passes to the zoo, so we can go as often as we want.  Here's one of our favorite photo spots...

 

 It isn't every time we go that we get to see elephants taking a bath, but this week we did!

 Best of all, this summer the Fort Worth Zoo welcomed 2 baby elephants to their herd - and we got to watch them playing.  Bowie was trumpeting and racing around, while Bluebell stayed close to her mother.

 

Another fun activity I like to do this week is smashing eggshells.  I saw this idea on www.babble.com last year, and my kiddos love it!  We had eggs for lunch one day, and I saved and washed the shells.  A box, a mallet, and safety glasses rounded out the materials needed.  This is a free, fun, sensory activity that children (and adults!) enjoy!

 I saved all the crushed shells in a zippered baggie, added food coloring and just enough rubbing alcohol to disperse the coloring, and made dyed egg shells.  Once they were dry, the children wrote large letter Es in pencil, and then wrote over them in glue before adding the crushed shells.  This was another sensory activity for the children, as well as a letter review and glue practice.  We got some bang for our buck out of our scrambled eggs!

 I found an awesome Humpty Dumpty activity on skellyskindergarten.blogspot.com. A hard boiled Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, then fell on various surfaces.  The children first predicted (a fancy science word for guessed) whether Humpty would break when he fell on each surface. 

 Humpty Dumpty did not break when he fell on the cotton balls!  He still looks so happy.

 All the children agreed that he was sure to break when he fell all the way to the floor, with no protective surface.  We did a count down from 10, and let him go on 0...

 Oh! Smashed!

 Here's the recording sheet I created to go with the activity. 

 We also enjoyed playing with plastic Easter eggs and finding the letters hidden inside.  We sorted the letters into Ee and Not Ee.

One of our friends is having a birthday, so she and two friends made birthday cake with me.  This was her first time to crack an egg, so I held her hands and helped her.  Next time she'll know how to do it all by herself!

Finally, we finished off the week with a cute Elmo craft that I found at TheCleverFeather.blogspot.com.  While I usually prefer art projects to crafts, this one offered so much that I had to use it.  The children got to tear the red paper into small pieces, an excellent fine motor activity to strengthen little fingers, and to prepare them for future writing activities.  They used scissors to cut out circles, a half circle and an oval - both another fine motor skill and a review of shapes, and then they had to squeeze the glue out of the bottle (more strengthening those hand muscles) to stick on all the parts.  Who could resist Elmo?!