March 17th, 2015

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

This week, before we celebrated all things green, we had fun with rainbows!  We started our Monday morning by mixing a big batch of rainbow playdough.

We also attempted to dye celery stalks.

I say attempted to dye celery because the most exciting thing they did throughout the week was wilt with faintly colored tips.  Everyday is a learning opportunity, especially for the teachers.

Once we had a basic understanding of rainbows, we also attempted to make our own.  We used a variety of objects to test which would create the most brilliant one; bubbles, a CD, crystal, a mirror, a glass of water, and a magnifying glass.  We all agreed unanimously that the CD worked best with the bubbles being a distant 2nd place.

For one of our math activities, we filled rainbow tubes with gold pieces...

...and graphed our rainbow diets, too.

We also managed to give our swirling-whirling rainbow another try - far more successfully this time!

U is for Underground!

In between all these rainbow lessons, we had time for our U-Underground art...

u is for umbrella!

...and u-umbrellas.

Then, it was time to prepare for St. Patrick's Day!

Miss Corinna helped the students to create leprechaun traps.

But, two tricky leprechauns, Lucky O'Reilly and Colin McDoogle, played lots of tricks anyways - complete with green footprints!  They left a note behind saying (and I'm paraphrasing here) sorry for not being sorry.

I'm sorry for all the mischief and trouble
But I had to leave in a hurry...on the double!
For me fellow leprechauns and I
Have many more tricks to play, by and by.
I'm wise to your trap, though it is quite spiffy.
Here's some gold for you, gotta run in a jiffy.
You are clever, but try again next year
To catch a leprechaun, from far or from near!

It was a fine day for our classroom!

March 5th, 2015

We looked!  And we saw him!  The cat in the hat!

This week, for Dr. Seuss' birthday and observing Read Across America, we celebrated all things Dr. Seuss.

...and started with Cat in the Hat hats.

T is for Turtle!

We also were introduced to the letter T and made our 

T [Yertle the] Turtles...

We built letter Tt's in sand...

...and printed them on whiteboards.

For our math instruction this week, we read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and were introduced to the concept of graphing.

We ate some and we graphed some.

We also had an opportunity to paint this week

and play with things that start with the letter T.

Then, we made our t-tape.

t is for tape!

After reading Fox in Socks, we took a classroom poll.

Finally, we ended our week with The Lorax.  We had a lot of fun!

Oh, the places we'll go!

February 27th, 2015

S is for Swan

This week, we've celebrated the letter S...

...and, shifting slightly from a transportation theme, construction. We read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel on Monday morning, and were ready to dig!

Really dig!

We also took the opportunity to examine official blueprints.  For whatever reason, deep in a storage closet upstairs, I found blueprints to an office building on 15th street downtown.  Together, my students and I found lots of squares, rectangles, triangles and ovals...

...and learned to orient ourselves on the blueprint.

**Sidenote: This is the last time I was able to successfully use my laptop before D-Day.

Our highlight of the week was a visit from Pilot Dan.  He talked to us, showed us pictures, and...

...let us try on his helmet.

For the rest of the day we were captivated by flight...

...and everything was turned into a plane.

s is for stickers!

Later in the week, we found time for our s-stickers...

...interactive white board...

...writing...

...bulldozing...













...and spilling applesauce our our heads.

May we all find time to freely hang.

January 23rd, 2015

N is for Nest!

This week we learned about the letter Nn

...and we started our unit on weather.

We first studied clouds.  Reading It Looked Like Spilt Milk, we observed how clouds take lots of shapes.

Then, we made our own clouds.

We also had a chance to study how warm water will rise up into the the cold sky (or a plate of ice cubes) and create droplets.

This week, we met Mr. Kyle, a preschool music teacher we hope to incorporate into our program on a weekly basis.

To further emphasize our number recognition, we built a community of cars (each one being numbered 1-20).  They had a chance to drive around, then ultimately wind up in their designated parking stall (also marked 1-20).

It's a good thing I went into the child development industry rather than urban development.  My poorly designed streets ran into one another and created terrible collisions and nonstop gridlock.









Thursday we read Strega Nona, a humorous story about a noodle pot that wouldn't stop boiling noodles.

n is for noodles!

Then, we made our n-noodles...




















...and fished out numbers from noodles.

Working with the __IT word family, we had fun with our take-home book.

Miss Corinna also had fun experimenting with swirling-whirling colors.

Because, why can't we make a rainbow swirling-whirling storm cloud?