Back to School!

Our first few weeks back were really exciting! Amy and I both have new rooms and had fun preparing our rooms for our new group of kiddos. The kids are already gettting acclimated to their new routines, learning how our classrooms work and what our expectations are. It's going great!

We started by reading some really great stories, and both of these were wonderful ways to teach compassion and the concept of building up peers or breaking them down. They are highly recommended!

After reading the story and discussing how a person's bucket could be filled or emptied, we painted our own buckets to display in the classroom. Although the concept is a little abstract, the kids really connected with the story and it prompted great conversation about how to treat others. The kiddos asked to hear it almost every day!

 

We also read Lily's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes and talked about our school rules and our classroom rules. We also learned how to describe a character by thinking about the story afterwwards.

After reading The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn we played a pocket chart matching game.

Next, we play name game names! First, we read this popular Kevin Henkes book:

Then we worked on name flowers. The kids wrote a letter on each petal and then painted stems and leaves. It was a great writing and cutting activity.

For morning message, we counted the number of letters in our names and compared them to Chrysanthemum.

We counted the letters in our name at math and compared more, less or the same!

Ms. Amy's class worked on name writing and free drawing with whiteboards.

Both classes worked on a name sheet called Rainbow names where we wrote our names with many different colors. You can print this out at home if your child wants to practice their name more! You can find it here.

After doing lots of names activities, we did activities to help us learn a little about each of us.

 Pre-K 2 made a "Tasty Face" snack craft! It was super cute and pretty yummy. (We used icing in place of peanut butter since we are a nut free environment.)

In Pre-K 1, we made people blocks. They are really silly and fun to play with!

The Pre-K classes gave the children an at home project to decorate a t-shirt that showed something about them. The kids did a wonderful job working on the shirts and were so excited to share them with us.

Pre-K 1 did self portraits to go with our shirts...

Both classes studied our fingerprints with magnifying glasses in science.

And  we explored our new classrooms, played with old and new friends and had a great time!

We hope your start to school was as great as ours!



The Orient Express

So....this post is incredibly late, but so worth posting! This was my favorite week all summer. I loved everything we did and there were so many incredible things to learn and discover about the countries we studied. Although our theme was "The Orient" we concentrated on China and Japan. I could have done this study for weeks! We started with Japan. We used rakes, sea shells and beads to create zen gardens.


We also tackled this pinterest inspired project and made our own playdough and seaweed sushi. It was such a big hit, the kids loved it.

We added our sushi to the home center for some orient inspired dramatic play.

For a literature connection we read several wonderful stories. This one was really sweet.

The story is about Children's Day in Japan. They make a kite for each child in the family. We made our own carp kites!

We also learned how to write Chinese symbols. This was a favorite project as well. One of the moms was very sweet to bring in a book from home written in Chinese. The kids loved looking at it and marveled at how different it looked than the books in our library.

We learned all about Sumo wrestlers and how they can not touch the ground and have to stay within the perimeter of a circle. We cut out and colored these wrestlers, taped them to cups and then played a game where we tried to blow our opponents wrestler off the table with a straw. It was really funny to watch.

For our cooking project we made fortune cookies. They were a little difficult to make and turned out sort of soft, but the kids thought they were really cool. We put someone's name in each one and they had fun finding the person whose name they had.

We discussed China's largest crop: rice! We played with rice in the sensory table.

Ms. Rachel read facts about China and Japan and we recreated their national flags.

The kids decided to make the sushi and noodles in home center into a resteraunt. They colored bamboo for a back drop for the resteraunt. So adorable!

And our best cooking project yet....Ms. Shannon fried rice for us! We even had our cooking area set up like a Hibachi grill! I couldn't believe how many kids devoured the fried rice.

We also read this sweet story with a very important moral.

Since I was moving and had a ton of extra boxes, we made these red clogs!

Aren't they stinkin cute?

Here's one of our morning messages.

I truly enjoyed every minute of this unit and the kids had a wonderful time. It was a great wrap up to our summer camp. Now I'm busy getting to know my new class and the year is already going by fast! Hopefully I can post pictures of the first few weeks of school tomorrow, the consent forms are almost all signed!