Gingerbread

Our class ended 2017 with a study of different versions of the Gingerbread Man.  We read each story, identified the characters, repeating text and each ending.  Then we compared each version of the story.  Students also identified their favorite version and drew a picture to accompany their response.  The versions we read included The Gingerbread Man by Karen Schmidt, The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett, The Gingerbread Girl by Lisa Campbell Ernst, and The Gingerbread Cowboy by Janet Squires and Holly Berry.  Throughout the week we also worked on counting objects, syllables, patterns, and letter recognition.

The first story we read was The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett.  The students were asked to recall which animals the gingerbread baby encountered and in what order.  Volunteers stood in line to show the order of events.

In the playdoh center, students used cookie cutters to cut out gingerbread people from gingerbread playdoh.  They then decorated them with buttons, eyes, yarn and other materials.

Our sensory bin had a variety of tinsel.  The students enjoyed feeling the different textures and searching for the gingerbread men hiding within.

As a math activity, students measured one another using peppermint candy printouts.  This practiced one-to-one correspondence and number recognition.  They also compared each other to our giant gingerbread man using the words taller and shorter.

In our dramatic play area the children pretended to be bakers.  They made gingerbread cookies and cooked them in the oven.  There was also a gingerbread house for the children to act out some of the stories we read.

In the art center children used different colored puffy paint to decorate gingerbread people.

One morning each child was given a gingerbread cookie and asked to take a bite.  We graphed which part of the gingerbread body the children ate first.  Almost everyone bit off its head!

As always the children enjoyed singing and movement activities with Mr. Ken.

Our class attended its first all school assembly.  We sang holiday carols led by Mr. R the music teacher and several teachers.  The children were amazing!

 

We ended 2017 with a winter party hosted by our room parents.  The children made snow globes, played a game and enjoyed a feast of delicious treats.  Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Five Senses

At the start of December, our class explored our five senses.  We began with our sense of touch.  Using both fiction and nonfiction literature, the children learned about our sense of touch and words to describe how things feel- bumpy, smooth, rough, soft, hard, etc.  The children used their sense of touch to determine objects in a Touch Box.  They also went on a scavenger hunt to find things that fell into one of the touch categories mentioned above.  We made books with examples of using each of the five senses as well.  

We read a book called The Seven Blind Mice by Ed Young in which each of the mice feel a different part of an elephant and think it is something else (trunk-rope, leg- pillar, tail- rope).  I made each of the elephant pieces out of felt, as the mice in the book felt a new part the children put up an elephant piece on the felt board until they guessed what the actual animal was in the book.  It was a great way to discuss sense of touch.

We also read Duck Rabbit by Amy Krouse Rosenthal as introduction to the sense of sight.  The illustrations in the book can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit.  It was great to see what the children thought.

The children also explored several I Spy books by Walter Wick and the book Look, Look, Look by Tania Hoban.  

In small groups we played a take away game in which we created our own I Spy with classroom objects.  The children then closed their eyes and one object was removed.  They had to guess which object was missing.  Another game we played was Guess What?  We took turns pressing an object into playdoh and the children had to guess the object based on its impression.

Our sense of hearing was put into practice as the children listened to different noises from a White Noise App and had to guess what made the noise.  We also made music with musical instruments and the children made their own tambourines with paper plates and beans.

When introduced to the sense of smell, the children smelled several different scents and then sorted them by scents they like and those they don't.

Finally, students participated in a taste test during which they tasted something sweet, salty, sour and bitter.  They determined which tastes they preferred and which they didn't and then graphed their results.

Embedded within our theme, we continued to focus on the difference between fiction and nonfiction texts, number recognition, letter recognition, counting, identifying syllables, data collection, sorting, and comparing sets using the words more and less.

Dramatic Play:
There were many new activities in the classroom including our 5 Senses Museum in the dramatic play area.  Here students practiced making designs and building on a light table, felt different textures on the Touch Wall, made music with instruments and tested their sense of smell by trying to match pictures to smells in smelling bottles.

Art:
Student created texture collages.

Sensory:
The children explored the properties of Ooblek (corn starch and water).

Gym:
In gym class students practiced skills of jumping from spot to spot trying not to land in the "ocean" during a game called Shark Attack.  In addition, they pretended to be different animals in a game called Stump the Teacher.