H is for Hawaii

What a great place to think about in January!  It gets pretty cold here so it's nice to put our thoughts somewhere warm and tropical even just for a little while! This week we made these cute pineapples!  They were great for practicing scissor skills as well as a super cute decoration for our class! As we thought about travel overseas we used an airplane math page to practice our adding skills. We used my large wooden dowels to practice segmenting words into syllables.  Of course, the words we practiced with were Hawaiian ones such as: Lei, ocean, sea turtle, volcano, pineapple, sand, hibiscus, hula dancers/fire dancers, coral etc. We also made our own Hawaiian lei's which in addition to being a darling craft is also perfect for the fine motor skill of beading! And for our grande finale we had one of our sweet mom's who grew up in Hawaii come in and teach us a really cute Hula dance called the Hukilau.  She also taught us the story and meaning behind it.  SO fun! 

H is for Hawaii

Well, it wouldn't be a good Hawaii lesson without the grass skirt and leis, so we just had to make some and be official for our Hula dance our preschool mom taught us.

Hawaii Syllables

Learning syllables is an important step in learning to read.  It helps the kids learn how to break down words into segments. We had fun using the rhythm sticks to count out the syllables found in various Hawaiian related words such as pineapple, Hibiscus, Hula dancers, volcano, ocean, sand, sea turtle, surfer, aloha, lei, pig, etc. 

Hawaii Sensory Tub

We did an ocean theme to represent Hawaii for our sensory tub this week.  It included blue aquarium rocks to give it an ocean like color/appearance, some hibiscus looking flower disks, some sea creatures (floating cartoon looking ones, and more realistic sinking ones), we had sea shells, a turtle scoop, clear marbles (bubbles), flat aqua stones, and some strainers. Oh, and  I couldn't resist throwing in some Little Mermaid stuff for all my princess loving girls in the class. Hawaiian happiness! 

Airplane Addition

I chose this particular addition activity since we are talking about H is for Hawaii and it seemed fitting for the vacation side of things. It's always funner to learn with interactive games if you ask me! 

H is for Hawaii

We were so lucky this year to have a boy in the class whose parents have actually lived in Hawaii!  She came in and showed the kids some pictures of Hawaii, and taught them a Hula dance.  She also shared a cute book from Hawaii called Musubi Man which is the Hawaiian version of The Gingerbread Man.  It was darling and had lots of Hawaiian vocabulary words to teach the children.  So fun!!!