Happy Monday!

 Look at the great alphabetizing the class did last week!  And they can read most of the words too!

 

 Math centers this morning: finding lots of ways to build triangles and hexagons.

 Measuring transportation with links and cubes.

Building with house blocks.

 More transportation fun at the end of a social studies lesson

Hopscotch!  Don't worry, I preface this with a "Don't do this at home" and "only the teacher can write on the carpet."

Humpty Dumpty writing: How would YOU put him back together again?

by hand (see all the yolk and shell pieces?)

 I would use glue.  (Look at that great spelling!)

 

Tape him up so he can walk again.  (More great writing and great spaces!)

I didn't put him back together.  I put him in the hospital.

Today

Not pictured: we had a bonus field trip today!  We just put out a bunch of transportation books and then we had a cool tractor thing (Feel free to comment and tell me what it was called) show up at school, so this afternoon we took a few minutes to go look at it in action. We decided it was a slow form of transportation, but it was cool to watch it work.

Alien addition: add some googly eyes :)

New dress-up clothes!  In social studies we talked about different neighborhood helpers and jobs by looking at the many hats that people wear.

During our reading time this week we've been working on alphabetical order.  First we worked with our names, then we did some fall words all together.  Later everyone got their own set of words to put in order.  It was a bit tricky since there were 2 A words and 2  P words, but we did pretty well!

Alphabet Party! (and other awesomeness)

I think this may be the first class picture we have.  Thanks to my favorite preschool teacher for popping over and snapping it.

This morning Miss Keili from the AZ Farm Bureau came and read to us about apples and then showed us how to make a Fall and Spring apple tree.  

Today was our alphabet party day!  That means we did lots and lots of literacy activities, like reading alphabet books, singing "Who let the A out?", writing letters, and doing fun alphabet pages (dot to dot, letter matching, missing letters...), and alphabetizing letters.

 It's amazing how much more fun it is to put cards in order if they are first thrown into the air.

  We ate alphabet snacks (and rocked out to the ABC disco)

 We played more games like, alphabet cover-up

 and matching upper and lower case letters

 and put together a really long alphabet puzzle.

 At the end of the day we went outside and made fruit prints with our buddies.  (We used to do apple prints, but after 6 years I was getting a little tired of apple prints, and we saw this really cute idea here so it was time to try something new.  Not sure if we'll add faces though)

 And a little dress-up during centers to end the day.

Happy Friday!

Ss is for super-awesome day (and really long post)

Ss is for sidewalk chalk. We went outside to attempt to write the lowercase alphabet. And of course we could draw afterward. It is so interesting to watch children work and to see the variety of ways they approach things. The other part of our writing today was called "Alphabet Measles". I don't know where I got this page, but it was a fun way to practice uppercase letters. Just connect the dots! I think at least one child snickered almost the entire time - they just thought it was so funny to be connecting measles to make letters. Some children tried to write the alphabet in order (that is what the paper said to do, but we took it as a suggestion), some decided to write it backwards, others wrote names, words, or random letters.
Ss is for science experiment. Here is the banana goo. It's pretty much broken down now and looks like mud. Fait accompli!
Ss is for sticky notes on things around the room that start with S (like snowy and Saturday and shelf, and scissors and someone who starts with S and...)
Ss is for shadow tag (our apologies to the junior high classes who may have heard happy shrieking this afternoon)
Ss is for sponges and stamps and seasons. (this is the apple picture I mentioned yesterday. I don't know why it is sideways - I uploaded it correctly twice. Tilt your head or computer.)
We are reading many color books and doing colorful experiments. I stole this idea from Mrs. Karen. We had a lot of fun trying to melt crayons (we initially tried it outside with just the sun, but it just isn't hot enough anymore, so we brainstormed other things that could heat them up - oven, microwave, fire, lava, hairdryer). Ms. VP lent donated her extra hair dryer. You should have heard the exclamations when it first started to melt. "OOOH" "Wow!" "It looks like fireworks!" It was a bit noisy but everyone had at least 3 turns to melt crayons. (Be forewarned: if you try this at home, prepare for multi-dimensional splatter... the side of our sink is more colorful than it used to be, as are the cleaning supplies. Also, Crayola crayons melt significantly better than Roseart crayons do). This was process, more than product, art.
Here is the final product:

Alphabet Party!

The alphabet is done,
So we had a lot of fun.
Hip hip hooray-
Today was party day.

Today our class had an alphabet party. This means that we did literacy activities throughout the day. In the morning we rotated through several centers: reading alphabet books,
making alphabet puzzles
(now it's done. This one is my favorite puzzle),
playing A, B, Seas, and an unpictured activity where they used tweezers to grab letters from a bucket to fill in the blanks on cards (A__C, gh__, __WX...)

Then at snack time the children were told they HAD to play with their food before eating it. We had alphabet crackers. We sorted, tried to find vowels/letters in our names/etc. We did some alphabet dancing (The ABC Disco by Jack Hartmann is the class' current favorite).

We read several alphabet books, sang and signed the alphabet to the tune of Who Let the Dogs Out? (Who Let the Aa out?), marched around the room chanting the alphabet, wrote the alphabet, did a fun alphabet dot-to-dot and matching page...and then it was time for PE.

This afternoon we added the alphabet song to our poetry books and played more alphabet games. Most children thought it was pretty hilarious when I threw some cards in the air (and then they had to put them in order).

Here are some children playing alphabet cover - simple but fun:
Matching uppercase and lowercase letters (baseball mitts and balls)
Next week we start letter of the week!


And a few pictures from earlier this week: the art center was rather busy.
Here are some binoculars and night visions.
And a cool-looking turtle.
Apple prints with buddies.