P05 2 Day PM

Tuesday, December 13

During our greeting circle time today we had a discussion about what Christmas is. There were many great responses and we wrote the responses down on chart paper. The group was asked what we can do for people during this holiday season and we listed these ideas on the chart paper as well.

We read the book Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

For our small group, we worked together in groups to decorate a Christmas Tree. The children had to roll a dice and count the number and thats how many decorations they had to put on the tree.

Thursday, December 8

We are continuing to talk about winter holidays celebrated around the world. Today we learned about a dance called "The Hora" that people do during Hanukkah celebrations. We put some music on and gave it a try. We learned about Kwanzaa as well. We watched a video that had some dancing and it taught us some words in Swahili that relate to ideas celebrated during Kwanzaa such as unity and working together.

We read My First Kwanzaa today and we reviewed the letter Hh.

We learned that a tradition for the St. Lucia holiday is that the oldest girl in the family wears a white dress with a red sash as well as a crown with leaves and candles. She serves the family a sweet roll similar to a cinnamon roll. During snack time we each had a piece of cinnamon bread and a scoop of frosting. We spread the frosting on our bread to enjoy a treat similar to the sweet bread served for St. Lucia.

For our group activity we made St. Lucia crowns. We ripped green paper into pieces to make the leaves for the crown. We glued on the leaves and then added candles with a small piece of torn orange paper for the flame.

We had candy, sprinkles, scoops, cookie cutters, and some Magnatile blocks in the sensory table. We used our fine motor skills as we picked up the candy pieces with the tongs. We used our imaginations as we used the materials. We made houses that we could decorate with the candy and we filled the cookie cutters with sprinkles and added details inside the cookie cutters with the candy pieces.

Tuesday, December 6

Today we started talking about holiday traditions from places around the world. During our morning circle we watched a video which was a song that explained holiday traditions for holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, and Chinese New Year.

We also learned that in Germany there is a St. Nicholas Day on December 6. The tradition for St. Nicholas day is that St. Nicholas leaves a treat in children's shoes. We put our shoes in the hallway to see if we would get a visit from St. Nicholas. Yeah!! When we checked our shoes we found a couple of pieces of candy in our shoes!

Our letter of the week this week is the letter H. We practiced making the sound for letter Hh and then created a list of words that begin with that sound.

For our story we read Hello Hanukkah.

In our small groups we learned how to play the dreidel game. As we spun the dreidel we waited to see if we would take a gem from the middle, put one in the middle, do nothing, take half of what was in the middle, or take all the gems.

We had our hands traced on green paper and we decorated our hands with dabber paints and glitter. Once the glue on our hands dries we will cut them out to make all our hands part of our bulletin board.

Thursday, December 1

We continued today talking about gingerbread men. The children are quite engaged with many activities in subject areas such as math, sensory, science, and art all relating to gingerbread men. Today we acted out the famous, "Run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!" We replaced the word run with many different words such as, skip, walk, jump, stomp, etc. It was a great gross motor activity during our circle time. We also listened to the story, "The Gingerbread Man!"

For our small group activity today, we glued paper "frosting/snow "onto a gingerbread house shape and then we added gumdrops to the frosting/snow. Each child got colored paper gumdrops that had a letter on them. The children had to put the letter gumdrops in order to spell out their first name.

Dissolving Gingerbread- We set up four different liquids: water, vinegar, milk, and oil. We took turns adding a gingerbread cookie to the different liquids. Before we put the gingerbread in we predicted what we thought would happen. We observed what happened once the cookie was put into the liquid and then we let the cookies sit in the liquids for a little bit. We observed that some cookies sank right away and some floated and then sank after a minute. We came back to check before we went home and we saw that the gingerbread in the water and vinegar were falling apart. The gingerbread in the milk looked whole but when we moved the container around it started to break apart. The gingerbread in the oil stayed together.

We did large motor activities in the Kiva today. We worked on balance, threw, caught, and bounced balls, and enjoyed playing with our friends.

Tuesday, November 29th

Today we started our Gingerbread Unit. During our greeting circle we were given some spices to smell. As we took turns smelling the spices we guessed what we thought each one was. After we learned what all the spices were we were asked "What do you think you can make if you mix cinnamon, ginger, and cloves with some flour, eggs and sugar? " You've got it! Gingerbread!

We read Ninjabread Man during storytime today.

In our small group we played a game with a partner. We practiced subitizing which is recognizing "how many" without having to count. We took turns rolling the die with our partner and then counting or naming "how many" without counting. We found the matching number on the gingerbread man and covered it with a colored chip to make it look like we decorated the gingerbread man with "candy".

We had gingerbread cloud dough in the sensory table. This is a mixture of flour, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and baby oil. This is a sand-like moldable dough. Gingerbread cookie cutters and materials to use to decorate the gingerbread were added to the table as well.

In our dramatic play center we used our imaginations to role play making gingerbread cookies. We used measuring spoons, mixing bowls, a wisk, rolling pins, and baking pans to act out the sequence of mixing dough, rolling out the dough, and baking gingerbread cookies.