Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and is having a fun/safe New Year's Eve!

I am REALLY lacking in photos for our week of Christmas. I let the classes have quite a bit of free play time and the week was generally very laid back and easy going. There was some gift exchanging, movie watching, and popcorn eating!

We did make a few crafts as well!

Snowflake ornament:

Handprint ornament which I'm bummed to see that all of the paint is chipping off of Maddie's. I assume everybody else's did the same thing. :( If I do this particular craft again, I will have to use a different kind of paint OR put a coating of something on top of the paint to prevent that from happening. What a bummer because they're so CUTE!

Here's another snowman ornament:

And finally, these super cute snowman:

Rr - Rainbows

Rainbows and triangles go together, right? They do when you turn your triangle into a colorful rainbow!

 

 

Our Science Time that we did this week with the older classes was a Skittles Experiment (thanks Pinterest)! They were divided into two teams and each team had three different colors of Skittles that were very carefully placed in a plate of water. The #1 rule was DON'T BUMP YOUR PLATE! The kids loved watching the colors melt off of the candy and slowly work its way around the plate. Once a color met another color - they both just stopped and didn't mix! Eventually even the S's on top of the Skittles floated to the top of the water. So cool!!

 

 

Afterwards, I had the kids color what they saw happening!

P.S. - The papers of red paint in the middle of the table was another super cool activity we did. I put a blob of paint in the middle of a pre-folded piece of paper and the kids folded it back up and then pressed and pressed the paint around. Afterwards, they each took turns carefully unfolding their papers and the pictures they each had were AWESOME! They just couldn't get over that each paint blob turned out to actually look like something! We had butterflies, birds, leaves, etc. Definitely another fun project!

To go along with our week of Rr - Rainbows, I had the older groups make a rainbow book! Each page was a different color of the rainbow and they were to look through magazines and cut out pictures of things they could find that matched the colors of each page.

ALL of my classes LOVE to play with Play-Doh! Here are some super cute and fun pictures of my younger classes have a good time with their Play-Doh. :)

The older classes have started to play school during their free play time and it is so fun to listen to them!

Mm - Me!

Up to this week, we had been learning bits and pieces about our body: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, hair, etc. We kicked off this week by talking about things that we all had in common and what made us each different and special! Then we took turns weighing ourselves, measuring how tall we were, and feeling our heart beat (especially after running in place as fast as we could!).

We also made very simple pictures of our family with cutout people and crayons!

The younger groups got to paint a cutout of child representing themselves!

Another fun project that the older groups were able to do was to decorate a life-size tracing of themselves. This was a lot of fun for them! (Although probably not the funnest project for parents to have at home. LOL) This particular project did take up our entire dining room and unfortunately our cats and dogs ruined some of them. :(

We also made handprint plates that each class painted after they dried!

We did some more small motor practice with tweezers and pom poms. :)

Math Time for the older groups consisted of small bathroom cups with the number 1-10 written on them and then a bowl of beans. This let them practice recognizing their numbers plus counting the correct number of beans to put into each cup. The 1-1 counting of the beans was a bit of a challenge so we will be visiting this activity again!

I also made some new sensory bottles (thanks to Pinterest of course)! There are a couple of alphabet search bottles, a number search bottle, magnetic bottles, static electricty bottle, sink/float bottle, etc. Fun!

 

We filled our bulletin board with a baby picture of everybody plus a current picture. BUT before I put them up on the board, we had to match the baby picture to the right person!