Aa is for Astronomy

This week, we talked about Astronomy.  I had cardboard tubes with a piece of black construction paper rubberbanded to the end with multiple pin prick in it.  When you look through the tube, it looks like starts.  We also tried to look at glow in the dark stars and this year as well as two years ago, this totally failed.  The stars lost their charge and went dark too quickly.  We also read books on Astronomy in the K-Prep class.

Our letter was Aa, color - yellow, number - 2, and shape - rectangle.

Our centers in both the K-Prep and Preschool class was dress up clothes and using the kitchen and accessories.  Here are some photos of that:

We had a birthday boy this week.  During circle time, he picked from our box of presents and opened it up :).

Here's our snack time where we got enjoy cupcakes and ice cream:

This week we had ANOTHER failed art project!!  Seriously - if an art project is published, it should be tested out, so that I don't have to do it before I present it.  I expect it to work, but it wasn't the case this time.  The children put white crayon dots on white paper and then had to do a wash with watered down black paint, which would create a night sky and the white dots would appear like stars.  Well, I put too much black paint in the water.  The paint covered up the crayon marks.  I ended up having to rinse off each paper in order to reveal their stars.  I was very disappointed.  Next time, I will use black WATERCOLORS!!!

Here's the children singing and having a fun time!

The Preschool class is continuing with the finger-painting.   They mixed yellow and a little blue to reveal a new color...green!  So far they did plain yellow, yellow with a little red to make orange, and now yellow with a little blue to make green.  Next time we do finger-painting, we'll mix red and blue to make purple.

The child in this photo (below) sat in front of his finger paints and didn't want to touch it.  He asked for help.  One of the teachers put his finger in it and he started to gag.  We had him use a brush, instead.  He is sensitive over the feel of finger paints.  I didn't want to push him to a point where it would make him puke.  There's no need.  On page 3 of this website: http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/the-truth-about-sensory-processing-disorder?page=2 
it says: "'Remember, we all engage in sensory seeking behavior (such as tapping a pencil or chewing a pen cap while concentrating) and sensory avoidance (I personally hate touching cold, mushy things like raw meat). It is when these needs or aversions interfere with our functioning and cause dysregulation that we have a disorder,' Kawa adds." 

Regarding sensory processing disorder: on page 2 of this article it says that 1 in 20 people are affected by a sensory processing disorder.  It continues by saying many people grow out of it or learn to adapt.

On Friday, we started a new schedule that I was testing out.  I broke the class into three small groups of 4.  We rotated to three stations: science, number writing, and story time.  Here are photos of these activities in action:

Next week, we are going to talk about the letter Tt and trees!