Counting & Letter Recognition
This week we utilized Valentine’s Day as a way to really focus on counting and also letter recognition. Everyone was very excited about hearts (corazon!), so we used them to see how many letters (or hearts) were in each name. i.e. Rachel is 6 hearts long.
We are beginning to know our first letter, and starting to know what everyone else’s first letter is. Our next piece is attempting to draw our first letter.
Density
We conducted a science experiment about density this week. Using five different liquids, we watched as they separated and created different layers in our jar. We used: Baby oil, Vegetable oil, Rubbing alcohol, corn syrup and water. We tried to color each layer, but if the food coloring was mixed in the oil it immediately burst down into the water layer!
Recipes
Recipes are not only for cooking food that we can eat, but also for a lot of the sensory materials that we use in the classroom. This is another opportunity to use our counting skills, learn the difference between types of measure (teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, etc.), watch as ingredients go through chemical reactions and change from solid to liquid or vice versa, and deepens our vocabulary base.
This week we made: salt dough, playdough, slime, and beet muffins! We are starting to incorporate a visual recipe so the children can see how many of each ingredient we will need to complete the recipes.
Specialists
Ernestina had us feed hearts to her T-Rex, taught us many words we use to show love and affection to our friends, and played the Skinny ma rinky dinky dink song for us.
Diane helped us make tea sandwiches with three topping choices. We tasted strawberry jam, apricot preserves and apple butter with cinnamon.
Coach C challenged our bodies with various games to improve our kicking and balancing skills.
Mr Andrew had us hopping and jumping for our whole music time!
Other Activities This Week
Sand play
Loose part play with rose petals and tulip petals
Painting cardboard hearts
Creating Valentines for our friends after drawing names randomly
Continued practice with our screw driver set
Walking outside on the rope