Today was all about fairies! Did you know that there are real fairy doors and villages throughout Ann Arbor? Click here for a tour map. We think that fairy door hunting would be a great weekend activity for families. If you find fairy doors in the city, we'd love to see your pictures! Miss Nicole's favorite fairy village is at Nichols' Arboretum. Miss Carey put up a fairy door in our room and after nap we found fairy dust outside of it!! The kids made fairy doors too and were very excited to put them up in their houses! We learned about fairy godmothers from Cinderella, practiced our numbers with fairy dot to dots, sculpted magic (glitter) playdough, and made wands! It was a magical day. We've been letting the students use educational apps on our ipod touches and ipads. Below is one student's recorded fairytale created on an ipod touch with the free app, Puppet pals.
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We sure were feeling the love today! We read Arthur's Valentine and Roses are Pink Your Feet Really Stink to get us in the Valentine mood. We listened and danced to a special Valentine's day "love" mix cd featuring some of our Disney favorites (and a few of our teachers' favorites...REO Speedwagon anyone?) We even got to make special tissue paper suncatchers, Valentines, and heart to toes artwork for our parents! Two of our friends brought in pinkalicious cupcakes to celebrate the day and we all got to pass out our Valentine's cards to our friends. Good thing we made special mailboxes! Friday ended our week long theme of make believe. We read the story, The Elves and the Shoemaker and the preschoolers used our play tools to make their own elf workshop! They pretended that they were making their own shoes too. We made elf ear headbands and colored and laced our own "shoes." Lacing was a bit tricky for some of us, but it was good practice to develop fine motor skills.
We're looking forward to this week's theme of fairytales and of course for our celebration of Valentine's Day! Parents--if you have any "treasure" that you'd like to contribute to our classroom treasure chest, we'd greatly appreciate it. Carey and I have been filling it with things from Target's dollar bin or little knick knacks that we've found at home. We're also going to check the dollar store. The kids absolutely love the treasure chest and it's been really successful so far in helping to keep them motivated to follow directions and be bucket fillers! Today we learned about make believe witches! We read Hansel and Gretel, retold by Rachel Isadora, and then we made witch faces and counted warts! We practiced "W" words and magic spells. Our favorite part of the day was probably our sensory stations! At one station we brewed a magic potion (green jello) with cat eyes (marbles) and lizards. The second station had monster muck and the third station was full of witch dress up clothes. It was a spooooooky day!
We drew wild things! We started today by reading, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. The kids LOVED the story!! Everyone drew their own wild thing and we put them on the wall in our classroom. Now our room is starting to look like a place where you could REALLY find wild things! We'll post pictures tomorrow. We listened to a Monster cd with the "Monster Mash" and "Purple People Eater" songs, made monster masks, and practiced our letter "M". The weather was nice so we got to spend some time outside today. We'll make monster muck tomorrow. Something strange happened in our room today! We found magic beans and planted them on our wall. Then, very slowly, a beanstalk began to sprout!
We read Jack and the Beanstalk and talked about giants before moving to our big table to act like scientists. Everyone got a magnifying glass and lima beans to observe. We opened the beans and looked inside of them to see the start of a tiny plant. Then, we drew scientific pictures of the beans that we saw. For art we made beanstalk and castle pictures, just like in the story we read. In the afternoon, we began our transformation into real pirates! After reading the book How I Became a Pirate, we made our own hand hooks and eye patches (couldn't find enough wood in the backyard for peg legs... ha ha). And what pirate would be complete without his trusty pet parrot? We decorated ours with watercolors and fwathers, then sent them to crew our pirate ship: Our day as pirates concluded as any pirate's day would... with counting our treasure! Arghhh!
This week we'll be focusing on make believe! Here are the plans
Today we blasted off to visit Earth's little pal, the moon. We talked about the phases of the moon, the moon's surface, and its orbit around the Earth. Then our mini astronauts put on their space helmets and prepped in the home base before going on an expedition to the moon! To make the moon's surface in our classroom we used pillows, cushions, and bins on the ground covered with white sheets. Then we added foam and cardboard moon rocks. There was a station for examining moon rocks, playing with moon sand, and viewing our surroundings with a kaleidoscope.
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