Monday, December 12th

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.

For our craft today, we used mini cars to dip in paint and we painted on a candy cane shape. Some of us tried using marbles to paint as well.

We created a countdown chain to help us count down the days until the Christmas holiday. First we worked on our skill at using scissors as we cut red and green construction paper into strips. The strips were each labeled with a number. We started with the number 1 and created a paper chain by adding each paper strip in number order. We will tear the links off each day as we countdown!

Friday, December 9

During our greeting circle today we watched a video that featured children our age. The children told us about their favorite Kwanzaa traditions. We talked about the candle holder called a kinara, the colors of the candles placed in the kinara, and that each candle stands for a Kwanzaa principle. We took turns placing pieces on our easel white board to build a kinara.

During story time we listened to a read aloud titled Celebrate the Holidays.

For small group we played a game to help us work on letter recognition. We pulled a gingerbread man with a letter printed on it out of the bag. We held the letter up for everyone to see and everyone named the letter. There were also foxes hidden in the bag, too. If someone pulled out a fox card we said that the fox ate all our gingerbread men and we all put our gingerbread men back in the bag. We then started the game again.

During work time we played a game where we fed the gingerbread man gumdrops. There were letters printed on the gumdrops. As we placed the gumdrops in the gingerbread man's mouth we named the letter.

Work Time Fun

Sensory Table

Making St. Lucia Crowns

Dissolving Gingerbread Science Experiment

Wednesday, December 7

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.

We started to make St. Lucia crowns in the art center. We tore green paper into small pieces to make the leaves for the crown. We glued these to a construction paper headband. We will finish by adding candles and torn pieces of orange paper for the flames on the candles.

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.

Monday, December 5

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 Nonna's Hanukkah Surprise.

Here we are checking our shoes:

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.