This week we will be Celebrating America! We had a quiet day today with 4 kiddos absent, but we had a lot of fun! We painted with star shapes using red and blue finger paint. We also made 3 batches of play dough to play with this week, red, white and blue. The boys loved measuring, pouring, stirring the ingredients and kneading the play dough!
Whatever you call them, Fireflies or Lightning Bugs they are a lot of fun to catch! Today we made our own lightning bugs in a jar using our fingerprints and glow in the dark paint. We also made a solar oven out of a pizza box… Thank you to our next door neighbor Casey’s for the pizza boxes! We made another batch of s’mores that we will enjoy as an afternoon snack. We finished our morning with a picture starter. A picture starter is when you add something to a sheet of paper and let the children create around it. I have used wiggly eyes, a circle, and a square in the past, today, I glued a single stick. They Loved this project so much! Some of the things they drew were a butterfly, a tree, a kings crown, a flag, and a cross. The tent will be coming down,our campfire and fishing pond will be put away, but it has been a really fun week! Hope it gave your children some fun memories! See you Monday for our Celebrating America Week! REMINDER No School Friday, July 4th.
I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite things about camping is cooking hot dogs on the fire and roasting marshmallows for s’mores! Today I shared my love of s’mores with the kiddos! We made and then ate s’mores. We cooked ours in the oven, I will save the campfire s’mores for you to do as a family :o) We finger painted on foil. This is something I have tried in the past but have always had trouble with using just foil; the kids would get frustrated when it would crumple up and it was hard to move to a drying rack, and really hard to send home. So we tried taping it to a piece of card stock, PERFECT! They also loved painting on the shiny surface of the foil! We tried something different with our story stones. The basket was passed around and all of the children took out one stone, we then went around the circle and added to a group story using the stone we got. We also read Curious George Goes Camping, and sang 5 Green and Speckled Frogs.
You can see more s’mores pictures on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/plaacademy?ref=hl
We made a s’more collage, played outside, used our story stones to make up some awesome camping stories, and sat around the “campfire”
Story Stones are something that I found on http://www.pinterest.com a long time ago. I have been wanting to try story stones in the classroom, but had never taken the time to make them. Finally, with the help of my daughter Emilea, we have story stones! I thought camping week was the perfect theme because we spend so much of this week making up stories to tell inside the tent and around our “campfire.” Today was the first day we used them and they are great! They can be used to tell a group story or an individual story. To introduce them today we passed around the basket full of camping themed story stones and each child took a turn making up their own camping story. They loved it and caught on so quickly! I see many many more story stones in our future! We also painted the logs for our group “campfire” we are making this week.
http://www.teachpreschool.org/2011/08/making-story-stones-in-preschool/
http://www.teachpreschool.org/2011/08/exploring-story-stones-in-preschool/
Camping is one of our favorite family activities especially if we include a float trip with our camping trip. I think I get as excited about this theme as the kiddos do! We had a great start to our camping week! We made binoculars, explored different shapes and sizes of leaves (they really loved the walnut branch that had a couple of walnuts on it still), went magnet alphabet fishing, and we told a camping story by taking turns passing the flashlight around and adding to the story!
The children love our 5 little monkeys sitting in a tree song, so we did 5 little fish swimming in the sea!
Five Little Fish Swimming in the Sea
5 little fish
Swimming in the sea
Teasing Mr. Shark
You can’t catch me
Along comes Mr. Shark
As quiet as can be…
and he SNAPPED that fish
right out of the sea
4 little fishes
Swimming in the sea.. (repeat until you get to no little fish)
We made ocean scenes with stickers, finished our hallway ocean, painted at the easel, played with play dough and ocean slime. Ocean week was a fun week! Next week will be one of my favorite weeks camping/outdoor week! Have a great weekend!
Today we welcomed a new friend! We also made octopus out of brown lunch sacks!
We had a busy day today exploring the ocean! We made a jellyfish in a bottle http://in-the-corner.com/2013/03/29/in-the-future-if-your-kids-ask-to-have-a-pet-you-they-arent-ready-yet-give-them-one-of-these-now-they-have-a-pet-jellyfish/ and looked at a few starfish and sand dollars I brought back from Gulf Shores Alabama. We talked about things you find in and around the ocean. We played in the water table filled with sea creatures, made a fish out of a paper plate, and made ocean slime with glass beads hidden in it. There were 3 different colors and they did a great job sorting and counting the little treasures they found. The Dress-up Center was the popular play spot today!
We started our morning with a special treat for breakfast! Thank You Gabi! We made an Ocean in a bottle http://happyhooligans.ca/ocean-in-bottle/ and baby sea turtles out of egg cartons http://www.crafty-crafted.com/animal-crafts/egg-carton-turtle/ Our ocean scene is coming along nicely! We also added letter cards to our kidfetti in the sensory table. This afternoon we will be exploring colors in our water table.
Play Learn Achieve Academy 