Thanksgiving 2012 and Review Week

For this age group, I don't get into the history of Thanksgiving.  Instead I focus on the "now" and what will happen in one week.  We talked about what we are thankful for, the food we will eat, and the family we might see.

We read a couple of books about Thanksgiving that were about the "now" and didn't focus on history.  They'll get their history lesson in elementary school.

I did a certain type of art project, which goes against my whole philosophy on art see "Arts and Crafts".  I chose to do a handprint/footprint turkey.  I don't have an assistant on Tuesday/Thursday mornings and Monday/Wednesday/Friday afternoons, so everything I do in those classes - I do on my own.   It was challenging, to say the least.  My assistant was a HUGE help on the days she was there!!!!  In one class, we decided to keep it simple and just do one hand print to be the whole turkey.  These rare craft projects really are for the parents' amusement and joy, because really, there is not a lot a child is learning when they have an adult press their hand/foot in paint or tell them exactly where to put their hands/foot.  When a child is able to freely take the directions and explore, then they develop their art.

For music, we sang, chanted, and acted out some fun Thanksgiving songs.  My favorite is the "Turkey Pokey"!

For writing, they practiced tracing their name.

For letter/phonics review, they played a game where they had to match the upper and lower case letters (only the ones we've learned) and say the sound that the letter makes.

For centers, on day one, they pretended to make a Thanksgiving dinner using the kitchen and accessories.  On day two, they played with puppet and had to follow the rule of being nice and not hitting another puppet.  This is challenging for children at this age.  This lesson is good for social development and oral language development.

Here are some pictures of our day to day routines:

A little bit of free play after snack.

What a sweetie!

Reading a book while waiting for his friends wash their hands.

Washing hands and waiting for a turn.

Here are some pictures of one class during their outside play who instigated using water to create a pool for dinosaurs.  I took a lot of photos using my action setting.  Click on the photo and you can scroll through, quickly.  I only put captions on a few.

"We need more water - it disappeared!  Quick!!"

When the water level was low, this child used a smaller cup to scoop and pour into a larger container.

Rr is for Robot

"r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r" says your little robot as they mechanically float around the room!  We acted like robots, read a couple books based on robots, sang some songs about robots, and our art tool reminds me of a robot part.

Here is one of our centers: nuts and bolts

Here is our second center: stackable robots

This week, for art, we used roll-on paints.  The container looks like a roll-on deodorant container.  I've read about using this tool.  The book suggested that I save and collect empty roll-on deodorant containers, pop the ball out, fill it with paint, and then put the ball back in.  Well, I found these already made, so I didn't have to go through the hassle.  The ball rolls around as paint comes out.  I was able connect robots to this paint tool and explain that the ball is a lot like an arm that can rotate. 

*Important note - I've been trying to come up with clever activities for early finishers.  I've decided that the children will take white paper and color with markers.  Before - they would play with the toys.  The problem with the later activity, is that they would rush through art and not learn anything from it, so that they could play with toys.  Hopefully, their art is more interesting than coloring on a blank piece of paper and they'll spend more time exploring.  So - if you see them bring home a scribbled paper from school - that is NOT our art for the week!

I realize the paper color is not the best, but I'm running low on large white paper.  If anyone wants to voluntarily donate some large white paper to paint on, I would appreciate it.  I have an abundance of other colors and I don't have the funds in my budget to buy other paper.

Here is a close-up of our "Roll-On Painter"

I do many different things when I teach the children numbers. One important technique is to teach the number line starting with zero!  I've seen many preschool books start with 1 and end with 10. Then the 10' ends with 20 and so on.  One problem with this is that when the children start adding and subtracting, they need to look at a number line to count forward or go backwards.  The number 0 is part of their math facts and they have to memorize these in first grade.  The number line is in math all the way through University when they deal with negative numbers.  When I taught 4th grade, I had to teach about number place and where a digit is on the number line.  When I teach the preschoolers that all of the single digit numbers are on the first row and then I line up the double digit numbers in the 10's, the zero is above the 10, the 1 is above the 11, the 2 is above the 12 and so on.  I can point out that the digit in the ones place is the same as the number in the ones.  Starting with 10, 20, 30...in a row of numbers also makes more sense, because it's the start of the 10's, 20's, 30's.  The books that show those numbers at the end of the row, makes no sense at all and confuses them when they go further into their education!  Okay, I'll get off my number soap box ;).

My store bought numbers don't have a number zero, so I had to make my own.

When my Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes have classes for all three days, on the third day, we've been doing science.  This week, we looked at objects under magnifying glass.  I have some science kits in a can, which makes my job so much easier!  We looked at a real yellow-jacket encased in plastic, a leaf, flowers, a penny, and our fingertips.

Here is one of my classes who chose to play with one toy, together, because we had to transition from snack to science.