Some of our Weekly Activities

Playing Bean Bag Toss with a friend was a huge hit! As you can see from the smiles below, the kids loved taking turns passing their bags back and forth with a friend.  This weeks theme was being a nice friend and I think this game was a great way to reinforce what we learned during class! We also played with pink play dough for pink day and had a rainbow/water themed sensory tub for the kids to explore different colors and to play in.  Good Times! 

Bean Bag Toss with Friend (Social Skills/Gross Motor Development)

Playdough (Color Pink Reinforcement/Creativity/Fine Motor Development)

Sensory Play-Water tools (Colors, Social Skills, Sensory Development, Fine Motor Skills/ Math/Measurement/Volume,  Transferring, Dramatic Play)

Purple Day

We have a bunch of "grape" kids in our class!  They thought the pictures were pretty funny too!  Below we took turns reading and sorting our newest sight words. 

Purple Craft

Sight Word Sorting

More Color Games

We did color word clip cards to practice learning sight words, we counted colorful buttons, and as a class we sorted different colored objects onto the appropriate color word card using our giant sorting mat. 

Sight word clip cards

Button Sorting/Counting

Color Word Sorting

Leaf Silhouette Pictures

I love that with these open ended art projects, the kids have so much fun, they don't even realize that they are learning!  I had them tape dried fall leaves on their paper first with painters tape so it wouldn't tear.  Next I gave them scrub brushes and fall colored paint to explore with (more color mixing fun).  I taught them how to stamp the paper around all the leaves and when they were all dry we lifted the leaves off for a fun leaf silhouette effect. I think they turned out really pretty!

More Color Mixing Fun

And this is one of my favorite things about teaching kids about colors! Their is so much discovery and science and learning that goes on as kids mix and and play with different colors and shades.  In the top two pictures the kids are using green, blue, black, yellow, and white to mix different types of green and to try and make some of the colors found on the paint swatch cards.  In the lower sensory tub picture, the kids are using eye droppers and water colored with the primary colors red, yellow and blue to mix different colors into the ice cube trays.  This is an activity the kids generally talk about and remember for years to come! 

Blue Color Stamping/Mixing

I gave the kids Dark blue, light blue, and white paint to explore and mix with sponge shape stampers.  They seemed to really enjoy themselves! 

Blue Bird, Blue Bird on my shoulder

To go along with our  color theme this month I taught the kids how to draw a blue bird using a step by step instruction sheet.  I teach the kids to draw one picture a month using this method.  I love to show them how pictures are made up of shapes and details and that even when we all make the same picture they all have their own individuality and that they don' t have to be identical or perfect to be beautiful.  I also think it is a great lesson on following directions and the kids generally tend to be very surprised how cute their pictures turn out which helps boost their confidence. Here are how our first pictures of the year turned out.  I think our budding artists did pretty darn great!

Learning Games

Below is a number matching game that is especially fun because you get to "fish" the matches out of the water.  We also used our counting grid to count "seashells" as part of our all about my summer theme-great for one to one correspondence!  The last picture is a game called knock-knock-who am I?  Not only is it a great way to learn names and get to know our new friends, but it is great for audio discrimination and listening skills!

First day!

Today our theme was the Little Red Hen so we read the story using flannel board characters (always popular with little kiddos), we focused on being a helper and also learning how to read and spell the word red.  We practiced using the red song found HERE. This month our sight words are a & and so we also did activities to help us learn those words.  Our sensory tub was sorting color words to color objects with tongs (fine motor practice), we made a Little Red Hen craft together (Following directions), graphed things that went with summer or "other season" on our giant graph (math sense), we also got to help make our own little red hen "bread" (science/math skills) with strawberry jam and drank strawberry lemonade with it for our red theme snack.  Lots of fun and lots of learning made for a great (official) first day of school!

Chicka Boom Boom Back to School

We celebrated the new school year with a Chicka boom boom party!  We got to bring our mom or dad with us and we played a parachute game with alphabet letters, did a chicka boom boom dance and a song, observed a real coconut,  made a chicka boom boom snack and picture using alphabet letters,  read chicka boom boom together, reviewed  class expectations and handed out parent packets.  It was a great way to start out the new year!