W is for Winter, W is for water

Ok, here I am again, catching up on preschool posts!!
We tried stations again this week. Mostly it went well.

Station 1 was matching capitals and lowercase

 Station 2 was counting objects.  They could choose whatever object they wanted.

 Station 3 was working on number recognition by covering dots with pom pom balls

Station 4 was building words.  I wrote "winter" as well as each of their names on a paper and then they had to use the alphabet beads to make the word.

 These stations seemed to work pretty well, though by the time they get to the fourth station, they are pretty much done.

We played a game on my newly discovered and much loved website, 2teachingmommies.  I thought the game was fun, but they had a hard time matching the dice to the correct number.  Definitely a skill we need to work on some more!

 I let them use q-tips to paint w's and their name.

 I gave them each 3 colors and they had fun mixing the paints to make different colors, most of which turned out brown.

We read a bunch of winter books, but I guess I forgot to take pictures of them! We also had a snowball fight with cotton balls, pretended to ice skate, and talked about what happens in winter where we live (no snow!)

Stations Day 2, we did a number puzzle (all the printables came from 2 teaching mommies)

 labeled snowmen

 made patterns...

and practiced counting.  (This was a little too hard for them to do independently) 

W is for Water
 The second week of preschool, we tried stations again.
Station 1 was the snowman game.

 Station 2 was w rubbings (I taped some w's on a cookie sheet- sandpaper, toothpicks, Popsicle sticks and a few others )

 Station 3 was mitten number matching

 Station 4 was sink or float.  This was an epic fail on my part.  Duh, it's like I've never taught before.  Because nobody did what they were supposed to.  They just watched whoever had the water station and asked me when it would be their turn for the water.  Give one kid a bowl of water.  What was I thinking?

 Some quick thinking on my part meant everyone got to play in water.  Luckily, my daughter was more than happy to share her fishy toys!

 We read about water

 We talked about the water cycle and observed what happened when water got hot (watched the steam and observed the condensation on the lid).

 And made our own clouds with cotton balls - when it got too full, it started to rain!!

 colored a picture of the water cycle

 We explored how water can make music

 We also played with ice and observed what happened when we held it in our hands.  We did a lot of playing with water and ice and learning about how water can change from ice to water to steam.  We did some fun dancing where we pretended to be ice, then water, then steam.