Thankful Thursday

A chef's hat, a double oven and a good imagination. What else do you need??

Me and My Tree

Everyone drew a picture of themselves and we added it to their Chicka Chicka Tree.

Thankful Thursday

The chrysalis turned black...

... And a few hours later the butterfly emerged. 

Truly amazing!!

IKEA Leaves

We have had IKEA leaves in our classroom for years.  We use them for instruction all the time. This week they were home to caterpillar and butterflies.

Eggs have been laid.

Caterpillar hatched.

Caterpillar ate and ate and got bigger!

Caterpillar turned into a chrysalis.

Another egg hatched. Still waiting for the chrysalis. 

Wow. The butterfly emerged from the chrysalis.

Pattern-Pillars

What do you get when you cross butterfly week with a lesson on patterning ?

 Pattern-Pillars of course!!!

These are fun and easy.  Cut out lots and lots of 1" circles of all colors.  A punch gets the job done pretty quickly. 

Adding machine tape was the perfect background.   Last year the kids picked their length and each tried to outdo the other. This year we decided the length and it was still even too long for the attention span of some. 

We worked in groups if two. Each child choose 2 colors and started gluing them down. 

The heads were random circles left over from another project   They added sticker eyes and drew a mouth. The mouth was supposed to be big so he could eat a lot!  Some were pretty funny. 

Then they climbed all over the door trying to eat the vine.

SKILLS INVOLVED: deciding 2 colors, gluing, patterning, drawing a mouth, following instructions, fine motor

WOULD WE DO IT AGAIN: Definitely.  We did this last year later in the school year with longer strips of paper and more complicated patterns.  It is always fun!

RECYCLE FACTOR:The circles were cut from scraps.  The adding machine paper was a donation.  The heads were leftover from another project.  The vines on the door were left from the monkeys. 

Thankful Thursday

Truly a miracle of God's creation. 

A big fat caterpillar at 10:30

A beautiful - and beautifully camouflaged - Chrysalis at noon !!

What a way to end our week!

Painted symmetrical butterflies

These painted butterflies were so much fun to make. 

The papers were pre-folded to help the process go more smoothly. 

The kids squeezed paint onto one side of the paper.  We carefully folded the paper in half again. 

The kids squished and pressed and rolled to make sure the paint passed to the other side of the paper. 

When we opened it up "Ooh. Aaah."  Amazing!

After it dried we folded again and cut it into a butterfly shape. 

Open up again and ....

These will go in our growth chart garden!  

A Traffic Violation

Today we had a traffic violation.  It was the first violation of the school year, so this seems like a good day to tell you about our stop light.

We use a stop light to help monitor the discipline in the classroom.  Each child has a clothespin with their name on it.  The clothespins start on GREEN each morning. 

If there are any problems/incidents/infractions that cannot be corrected with some reminders or redirection, the child's clothespin moves to YELLOW.  From yellow the child is able to make better choices and move back to GREEN, which is frequently what happens.  If they don't move back to GREEN then we let the parents know what happened including the decision to not improve.

If the behavior is extreme they can go right from GREEN to RED.  Or if it escalates once they are on YELLOW, the clothespin goes to RED.  On RED, the child must go spend some "quality time" in the director's office and hopefully learn about making better choices.  The parent is notified.

For the most part this system works in our classroom of 3-year-olds.  Most of it depends on our consistency in enforcing the classroom rules.  The traffic light is very visual, very familiar and very easy.  Just the thought of getting on YELLOW is enough to keep most kids well behaved and that's what we want.

Thankful Thursday

Things are all out of whack this week. Medical emergencies will do that to you.  So it is really Friday.  

We are thankful for bodies on the mend and that class went smoothly this week in the midst of everything else. 

What Can You Do With Paint Cards?

To strengthen scissor skills we got a handful of paint cards and let the kids at them!!

The color of the week was yellow!

They had a great time.  The thickness of the card makes it easy to hold.  The cutting line is obvious - although sometimes a lofty goal. 

We are wondering if the local hardware store will notice huge chunks of colors missing each week!

We are also trying to figure out how to convince the paint company to just send us a box of cards!!

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Trees

We are making Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Trees with the extra coconut circles.  Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is a great book for this age.  Lots of repetition and a fun story overall.

We do as much as we can with the children's names so that they learn to recognize their own name, each other's names, and then can start to write their name.

Our tree starts with hand print branches.  We use a brush to paint on the child's hand.  We have found that it gives a more even coverage than if they dip their hand in the paint.  Then press the hand down for a branch.  Repeat for as many branches as you want.

While Melissa was painting hands, Kathy was stamping letters.  (We usually work one-on-one, especially in the beginning of the year.  We just call the kids from their play to work with us and then they go back to play. ) The children choose as many circles/coconuts as they needed for their name - every name is different!!  Then the children stamped one letter of their name in each coconut.  The names were saved in the muffin tin til later.

Later in the day when the paint was dry, the children glued on a trunk that was precut from textured wallpaper.  Then we got out their coconuts, put them in order and they glued the coconuts onto the trunk.  The first letter goes on top just like the "a" in the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story.

Ta-da!!!   The tree is finished, but we are going to add more to the project this week. 


SKILLS INVOLVED: counting, recognizing letters, recognizing name, gluing, speaking and listening, textures - tree trunk and paint on hands, following instructions, fine motor

WOULD WE DO IT AGAIN: Definitely.  We actually did this two years ago, so knew it was a good project.  The kids had loved getting their hands painted and using the rubber stamps, the parents who saw us painting were thankful it was us and not them!

RECYCLE FACTOR: The coconuts were cut from scraps last week when we did the monkeys.  The tree trunks were cut from a textured wallpaper that we got at a yard sale a few years ago. 

Don't forget to check back later to see what else we do.