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!

Snow, Snowmen, and Mittens

     I'm beginning to think winter is not a good time for me to blog!  Last January I think I had one post and this year I'm going to have two! :0  I do have a fairly good excuse this time.  My camera was locked up for some reason.  I couldn't take picture or upload them on to the computer.  One of my friends helped me out at school today and now I'm back in business!  Unfortunately, I don't have any of our fabulous pictures from our Penguin theme!  Here are a few of our activities that we did the first couple of weeks after the winter break.

Snowman Glyph from the fabulous Deanna Jump.

Snowflake art-  You are actually suppose to paint these on canvas, but we painted on poster board.  Before painting, there was masking paint put down in the shape of a snowflake.

Painting our snowflakes

The finished product!  I love these and hated to send them home!

Love our little sock snowmen!  They always have their own little personality!

We laced mittens to go along with the story The Mitten by Jan Brett.  Inside the mitten were pictures from the story that they used for retelling.

Last name snowmen

The back of our mitten lacing

     I promise to do better!  Now that my camera is working again I can get some good pictures with the kids actually do these things!  Tomorrow is our Teddy Bear Parade and Picnic, so I will have more up this weekend!

Polar Express Day!

     Today we had Polar Express Day!  This is another one of my favorite days of the year!  I just love all of our events leading up to it, the activities that we do during it, and watching them all come in their cute little Pj's! :)  It's so hard to get good pictures because we are so busy durning this activity!  I also realized I forgot to take some pictures that were sent home today, so maybe next year I will remember!  

Having our Polar Express snack!

We had cookies, popcorn, and hot cocoa.  We also had marshmallow and candy cane to put in our hot cocoa.

Getting ready to take off for the big event!

I make these ornaments every year!  I love it!  This year I had a mom come in to help, and I am so thankful that she did!

Candy Train Oranemnt- One roll of Life Savers, I package stick gum, 1 starburst, I miniature Hershey bar, 4 peppermint candies, 1 Hershey Kiss, and 1 Rolo.  Use String to hang as an ornament.  We use hot glue to put the candy pieces together, but you could use glue dots.

We had a special delivery from the North Pole!  It was freezing cold and addressed just to us!  Inside were silver bells with ribbon on them.  We could all hear the bells ring...even the teachers! :)

Working on our journal page- They drew a picture of what they would like for  their first gift of Christmas to be.  I forgot to take a picture of the train that we made.

Sweet Friends

Receiving the bells

     Tomorrow we have our party and last day before the break!  Whew!  Fun times, but it will be nice to sleep in!  Hopefully will get some pictures up tomorrow of some more activities that we did during December.