December Preschool

We started December learning about bears and how they hibernate.  Our letter was B! 

Some books we read.  The Very Cranky Bear is a favorite in our house!

 B snack - Teddy Grahams and blackberries!

 You can learn about B and not play with balloons.  We read this cute story before doing some balloon dancing.

 Somehow that's all the pictures I took of the bear unit.  I know we did a Bear hunt, we searched for things that were big, then brown, then blue.  We pretended to be bears and hibernated.  Then I'd say, "It's Spring!!" and we'd wake up and look for something to eat! We also learned "the bear went over the mountain".

The next 2 weeks were spent on Christmas.  The first week was Santa Christmas.  Having been an elementary school teacher, I have a few Christmas favorites.

We made cute Santas out of triangles (which I have no pictures of).  We played Santa and the Children.  3 would go to sleep and 1 "Santa" would bring them each a present, then go and hide.  Then the children would wake up to see what they got for Christmas.  It was really fun.  

I thought it might be fun to have them draw their letters in flour.  2 outright refused to do it.  The other 2 told me in no uncertain terms they did not want anything to do with the letters.  So they just played in the flour and pretended it was snow.  Whatever works!! (Can you believe I have 4 preschoolers and not a single one of them likes to get their hands messy?  No fingerpainting for us! 

Week 2 we did "Jesus Christmas" and I tried to involve the Savior in our Christmas activities.
After reading my college bud's blog, I copied her idea and did stations.  The kids loved them!! I need to be better about the timing though. Some activities took way less time then I thought they would and so we ended up having everyone wait for someone to be done before we could switch.
The stations were: ordering sheep biggest to smallest

 Matching

 Counting stars (this took the longest)

 And tracing shapes, which I didn't get a picture of.

We also practiced our fine motor skills by learning to cut.  I gave them some scissors and scrap paper.

 We read some good Christ-centered Christmas books.

 We kept learning "Must Be Santa" to sing for our mommies at the Christmas party. (Ok, not Jesus related, but it took us two weeks to learn the song!)

 More cutting practice.

 We talked about what the symbols of Christmas mean.  Angels, candy canes, stars, lights, bells, presents, trees, wreaths.

 We did a nativity puppet show (and then performed it for mommies at the party)

 We colored candy canes and I let the kids wrap them themselves.  I tried to get the kids to do a pattern on the candy canes, but they all just colored it however they wanted.  Whatever!

 At the party we ate reindeer sandwiches.

 and made paper plate Santas.  I thought the popcorn beard was a great idea.  This picture shows the most popcorn that got glued on. The rest got eaten.  And some beards (like my own child's) were nonexistent.  The great thing about preschool is I don't care if they don't do it just "right"! No test scores, report cards, SST meetings, etc that I have to account for all the work the child did or didn't do.  Not gluing on a popcorn beard is the least of my worries!!

I'm sure there was more, but that's all can remember!  Now I'm all caught up and hopefully I can keep up week to week when it's easier to remember what we've done!