Rock Stars

We celebrated the letter R this week with some rock and roll! Not only did we color, cut and glue some rockers and design our own guitars, but we painted with actual rocks and studied fossils in rocks at the sensory table. We also read a great Noah's Ark story called Rock Steady by Sting. We freeze danced to some music by Wilco and at the end of the day had a special family visitor to make us some green smoothies. They were delicious. We wrapped it up with more family visitors who helped us make box guitars and egg carton caterpillars inspired by The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was a very fun week!

There was a large sea shell fossil in this rock and he was holding it up to see if he could hear the ocean.

rocking on his new guitar

beautiful finished products of our pebble painting

trying our healthy and yummy  smoothies

shaking our rock paintings

decorating our box guitars

caterpillars 

Minding Our Ps & Qs

Two weeks worth of learning to fill everyone in on! P week was full of fun and we wrapped it up with a Pinkalicious party on Friday: pink books, pink snacks and drinks, pink decorations, pink everything!. We also started our Family February guests with a lovely visitor who shared with us the story "The Kissing Hand" and helped us with some crafts related to the story. Our second visitor made up a story out of her head using toys from around her house! She helped us color our own story bags so we could do the same thing at home. Thank you to our special family visitors! For Q week, we used Q-tips to paint with and to do a science experiment with (see the picture below). We also made queen puppets and read some wonderful stories about quiet crickets and special quilts.

Jumbo P: pizza

painting with pink and purple

popcorn kernels in the sensory table

extra writing opportunity for a little more challenging work

Pinkalicious inspired bookshelf

making cards and pictures for our friend

pink P's

some cutting practice with crepe paper

throwing in a shot of all the wonderful ocean reports from a couple of weeks ago

our family inspired Valentine's bulletin board

We observed what happened when food coloring came in contact with dish soap! 

fine motor practice:peeling stickers and placing them around the lines of the heart shape

queen puppets

spontaneous game of memory

Valentine's Day Party!!! 

Oceans

We had a wonderful week exploring oceans and the letter "O" The children did an amazing job with their ocean reports and they were so proud to share what they had learned with their friends. These projects are hanging in the hallway next to our classroom and I encourage you to take a look. We also used ocean stamps on our Jumbo O, made fun and squishy ocean bags, and had plenty of ocean books to read during the week. We could have spent two more weeks on this topic!

sea shells in the sensory table; added magnifying glasses so that we could take a closer look at these beautiful objects

our classroom door; they colored and cut out ocean creature to glue on to our door ocean-scape

I placed a basket of sea shells and starfish along with a book about sea shells  on a table and an invitation to explore, draw, trace, etc

We talked quite a bit about the fascinating features of an octopus. On this table there was a large assortment of objects and they went about sorting these objects in to groups of eight, just like the number of arms on our octopus friends. This was a busy place!