February Preschool!

G is for Groundhog

I gave the kids a break from stations, and we did a few activities together to celebrate Groundhog's day! First was matching names to the groundhog (from 2teachingmommies.com)

 We read some cute books and learned about shadows (Go to Sleep, Groundhog had the Groundhog waking up too early and saw some holidays he doesn't normally see, so we put those holiday pictures in order after we read the story)

 One of the moms made these cute groundhog cupcakes!

 We went outside because I was going to trace their shadows on the driveway, but the kids just wanted to run and play. So we played letter hopscotch instead. (Yes, I love living where it is warm enough to go out and play on Groundhog's day!)

We read more about Groundhogs (and actually watched the real groundhog on TV - the kids loved him!)

 Some writing practice (also from 2teachingmommies)

 Of course, we had to make shadow puppets.

 We also played Groundhog, AWAKE! Which was bascially everyone would lay down and hibernate until the "it" child would shout, AWAKE then they would wake up and go look for their shadow.  It was a hit! Then I put different objects in front of the light, and they had to guess what it was, by only looking at the shadow.  It was really fun! We also searched for things that were green or growing when we went on our letter G walk.

V is for Valentine! 
We pulled food out of our letter V bag, looking for Vegetables.

 Lot's of Valentine stories...

 Did some counting/number recognition with hearts (draw a number, then count out that many hearts)

 We read a cute story about Valentine Mice and I wanted them to make heart mice.

 The finished products were a little more free spirited.

 We learned about Volcanoes

 Practiced writing our letters in rice

 We love stick pretzels for a snack because they can be used to make letters! We made lots of V's and a few letter I's.

 We decorated Valentine bags to put our valentine's in.

 I used my foam stickers and some foam blocks I scored at the Target Dollar spot in August to make stampers.

and we made "dino-mite" valentines by stamping hearts to make the plates on a stegosaurus. 

 Snack on Valentine's was red Jell-o, pretzels and juice.  I meant to make Jello Jiggler hearts, but realized too late that I didn't have enough Jell-o for that.  It was not worth the late night trip to the store.

 In preparation for our field trip to the fire station, we learned about fire safety.  We learned how to stop, drop, and roll, practiced crawling under smoke if there was a fire in our house, and learned how to call 911 in an emergency.
For the craft, I had them color a fire as big as they could.

Then we used the play phone to call 911 and the firemen showed up and sprayed the fire with water. 

 We read some books about fire engines and practiced what to say when we call 911.

 R is for Red
We did a mini unit on Fairy tales (not a lot of pictures of this one because I lost my camera for a few days...)
We read a few fairy tale books...

 Started a little red hen craft (took way longer than I thought, so we'll finish next week)

 Read the three little pigs, then used our cutting skills to retell the story.

 (1st house of straw, 2nd house of sticks, 3rd house of bricks)

 We also looked for things that were round or red.  We read the Billy Goats Gruff and built bridges for the Billy Goats to go over.  We read the ugly duckling and practiced speaking nicely to each other.  We drew cars and practiced rolling, running, racing, jumping rope, and other R verbs.

I is for ice
We learned about ice.  I colored water with food coloring and then froze it into mini ice cubes and let them paint with them.  Fun but very messy!

 We tried making the letter I with sticks

 We built igloos out of blocks. 

 That's all the pictures of "I that I have, and I honestly can't remember what else we did! I've got to be better at updating this blog!

P is for Polar animals! 

We learned about polar bears and how they need fur to keep them warm. They can't be Purple...

 They have to be white!

 We looked for things that started with P

 We read about polar animals

 Practiced writing the letter P

 Played polar animal graphing (from 2teachingmommies)

 Ate popcorn and glued it on the letter P (which, by the way, didn't work and all the popcorn fell off as soon as the paper was moved.  Oh well, they had fun!)

 Made a penguin out of hearts.

 We also played "polar bear or penguin" and I'd shout out one of the animals and they'd have to walk around like that animal.  And that's all I remember.  I'll try to be better about updating weekly so I can remember things better!

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.