First week of school

Well, I've been MIA for a very long time.  Partly because my camera completely crashed.  I lost everything!  It was totally devastating.  The other reason I've just had a lot going on personally and didn't have it in me to do much blogging.  The good news is I'm on the road to recovery and I'm just going to use my phone to take pictures for a while.  These are not the best pictures, but will give you a peek into our class!  I will have to say this is a sweet little class, and I think we are going to have a fantastic year!

We keep it fairly simple the first week with centers.  They are more play based to help establish routines and procedures.  This is the puzzle center.

Art Center- We are painting the first two pages of our Creation books.

Housekeeping Center

Block Center- I added the school house and bus to go along with the theme.

The girls preferred the toys more than the blocks. :)

Our lesson on how to use markers-
This is Marker Happy all sharp and new
He can color anything, just tell him what to do!
His cap is on tight pushed down with all your might
Marker Happy will sleep so well tonight!
His tip is sharp and ready for art
Marker Happy is so lucky and smart!
This is Marker Sad, all grumpy and mad.
His cap is gone and is all dried out!
So all he can do is cry and pout
His tip has been broken with a pound, pound, pound.
Look at Marker Sad with his big frown.

I did not catch the picture, but after learning about how to use correctly use markers., we sorted them by color.  We also matched the correct tops to the markers.

We are going to make a class book with these cute cat in the hat pictures! :)

Learning how to use scissors

We had a giant pair of scissors that we used to demonstrate how to hold the scissors correctly, and then practiced cutting.

They had a few different sheets to practice cutting- straight line, wavy line and zig zag

I'm so excited about my new partner!   She is going to be a great asset!  We are already having a great time bouncing ideas off each other and planning.  This is going to be a great year!

     I'm off for the weekend to visit my son at college!  Hotty Toddy!

5..4...3...2...1 BLAST OFF!

During our Space theme my camera was still not working, so I have very few pictures.  These are pictures that I took with my phone, so they are not all that great.  This was the book we did to go along with our theme from Musings of Me.  Some of the pictures are not complete because we had not painted some of the details yet.

We learned about the moon.  We read a fiction and nonfiction book about the moon.  In centers we played with moon sand.  You can buy it or make the recipe from here.  We also painted a moon and wrote a sentence about the moon.

On our star day we read a book about the Big Dipper and discussed how stars can make a picture in the sky.  We were going to make constellations with stickers, but ran out of time!  We also learned about the sun and discussed that the sun is actually a star.  

They loved learning about the planets!  I told them when I was their age Pluto was a planet, but now it's not.  They thought that was so funny, and they thought I was really old! LOL!  We also made coffee filter Earth's and wrote sentences about what we learned about our planet Earth.

Rockets and spaceships were a favorite!

This page also went along with our moon day.

We discussed satellites.  I really did not get into spaceships or aliens, but told them that was just for fun.

I have a little mini unit that I like to do with the book Aliens & Underpants, but we were running out of time, so I did not do that this year.

We had a fun time learning about astronauts!  We ate the same ice cream that astronauts ate and then graphed whether we liked the taste of it or not.  Most of the class did not like the astronaut ice cream. :(

I love our Space theme, and I'm so disappointed that I don't have many pictures of our activities....there's always next year! :)

Mystery Reader

     We had a wonderful Mystery Reader, Grandma T, who came to read to our class last week.  She is a former preschool teacher, and you could just feel her love for children. :)  We were finishing up our bear theme and beginning our dental health theme, so she read two stories!  I apologize for the pictures being so bad, these were not taken with my camera.

Grandma T was the sweet one's grandma.  She introduced her stories first by her little friend (I can't remember the little puppy's name!) and asked the class if there was something they thought they could learn today.

The first book she read was The Tiger that went to the Dentist.  It is the cutest book!  The class loved it!

She had a cute little poem that she read to the class.

I was not quick enough to get them acting out the poem! :)

Some of the props that went along with the poem.

She read another book The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear.  (I love that story!)  It was really cute how she introduced the story.  She had a little mouse and had the class look for it.  It ended up in a little pocket on her back.  Sooooo cute!

     I love have special guest in the classroom!  It's always especially nice when you have a former preschool teacher and goes over and beyond!  My kiddos talked about having her all week!  Good stuff!

Teddy Bear Parade and Picnic

     Oh my goodness!  I am falling so far behind!  My camera has been having major issues, and I just finally was able to get it repaired.  Hopefully, I will be able to get caught up this week.  These photos are from a month ago!  We had such a fun time!
     These are pictures from our Teddy Bear Parade.  They get to wear their pj's to school, bring their teddy bears (or other special animal) in a float that they made with their families, and then we have a little parade for the other classes and parents.

After the parade, we have our Teddy Bear picnic.

We have Teddy Grahams, strawberries, Goldfish, Honeycombs, and Berry juice.

Then we do some special activities with our bears.

We measure with linking cubes to see how tall they are.

We see how much they weigh.

Love this!  This was one HUGE bear! :)  We compared sized of our bears to our friends.  It was very easy to figure out which one was the biggest! :)

We had a fun Gummy Bear sorting and graphing activity.

Gummy Bear Science- This activity was from Teach Preschool.  I will have to say it was a really cool  experiment!

After a couple of days, it expands.  Either I forgot to take a picture out of the water or it didn't take, but it was twice the size after leaving it in water for a few days!

We made predictions of what would happen to the Gummy Bears after they were put in the water.  I forgot to snap a picture of our writing after it happened.  I love that many of them thought it would sink or float.  They really loved our sink or float experiments!

     Whew!  This was a long post!  At least it wasn't in June! :)  Have a great night!