PAINTING WITH MUD

Everyday when we come in, we get our morning work of coloring and cutting out of the way.  Once we are done with our work, we put it in our book bags and then we can play with the items on the table.  We can't wait to come in every morning and see what new things we get to do!

After our morning work is done, it's time for Circle Time.  Every morning we pick our line leader with the help of our "Helper Hanger".  The line leader then comes to the front of our group and holds up the American Flag while we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing Salute the Flag.  We are getting so good at memorizing them both!

Today at school we made MUD and for our project we painted a picture with it!  In order to make the mud first we had to have the dirt.  Next we had to add water to make the mud.  In order for our mud to stay in place on our cardboard, we had to add some glue from the great big bottle of glue!  Everyone took a turn to help mix it all together so we could paint our cardboard with it!

With all of the rain we had lately, we take every chance we get to burn some of our extra energy on the playground.  Everyone plays really well together and has so much fun!

OUR FIRST WEEK OF PRESCHOOL

The first week is always a busy week.  We work on getting to know our classmates and what is expected of us at school each day.  Here's a few pictures from our Get Acquainted Day.  As you can see, if there were any tears at drop off, they quickly were wiped away and everyone started having fun.

Once the rain stopped we were FINALLY able to go out on the playground!  It's a big hit with everyone and we love to run and play with all of our new found friends.

We worked on a few of our projects.  We made our calendars by gluing down our dinosaurs, volcano's and monthly blessing.  The best part about our calendars was making the lava flow out of our volcano's!  We also made our monthly place mats that we eat our snack on every day.  We are working on our name recognition by everyone having to find the place mat with their name on it.  This month it also has their picture on it to help them put their face with their names.

With a few rainy days, the playground has been closed so we have had to find some other fun activities to do in the classroom.  The help us develop our muscles in our fingers, we played with the Play-Doh and cookie cutters.  We had a lot of fun rolling it out with our rolling pins and learning how to make is spread out with just our hands.  We also were able to get some of our wiggles out by leaning "The Car Song".  Mrs. Knudsen made up some really funny moves to the words in the song and we all love driving our cars!  One of the rainy days, Mrs. Knudsen made a BIG MESS on the carpet with A LOT of really small bugs.  We decided to help her clean them up using our tweezers, and we didn't even realize how we worked our fine motor skills by helping her!!!

We all love snack time and the yummy treats we get each day.  Some of the snacks not all of us have tasted before, but everyone is always up to try something new!  How awesome is that?  

 Lastly, I think our most favorite activity from our first week was our Pete the Cat books.  We all just laughed and laughed at that silly Pete and his school shoes!

MOTHER'S DAY PRACTICE

We've been practicing for our Mother's Day Program on Friday and 

WE SOUND GREAT!

Can't wait to share our songs with our moms!

SCIENCE LAB - THE POWER OF MAGNETISM

Here we are learning about the special power that all magnets possess - the ability to hold and move other pieces of metal that they are attracted to. We learned all magnets have two poles, a north pole and a south pole. We discovered that only different poles will attract one another while same poles will repel one another. The children especially loved being able to actually feel the magnets as they repelled against one other. No matter how hard they tried, no one could get the magnets to touch!

The children loved just playing and building with magnets of all shapes.
We've worked with them many times since we did this lab. Such a great,
creative science lab.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF A CHICKEN

 Today we learned all about the life cycle of a chicken. After learning all about birds, we know that all birds have wings, have feathers and lay eggs. 

 Mrs. Schwalbe brought in some different colored chicken eggs to show the children. Best of all, she introduced the children to Sparkles, one of her own chickens!

Needless to say, meeting Sparkles was a big hit with the class!!!

MAGNIFICATION - making things LOOK big

During science lab #4, we took a look at magnification. We learned that when we magnify something, we only make the item look larger while it actually stays the same size. We discussed the different tools we can use to magnify an object. Here we are looking at a feather under a large screen microscope.

Each child was invited up for a closer view of the feather, which looked very stiff and sharp under magnification.

We spent some time looking through view masters. Everyone loved how they made

such tiny pictures easy to see.... and in 3D too! We could have looked through these all day.

Lastly,  we learned how to use magnifying glasses properly and then used them to look at the details of all kinds of tiny objects.