P05 3 Day PM

Monday, December 12

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.

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.

Dissolving Gingerbread Experiment- We put baking soda into gingerbread cookie cutter shapes. We added some cinnamon on top to add a nice scent. We used eyedroppers to add water to the baking soda. This created a paste consistency. We then used vinegar and dropped drips of vinegar on top of the baking soda in the gingerbread man shape. We watched the reaction. We were surprised at the fizzing reaction. After several drops of vinegar the shape of the gingerbread began to dissolve and it looked like it was melting.

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.

For our small group activity we made St. Lucia crowns. We tore green paper into small pieces to make the leaves for the crown. We glued these to a construction paper headband. We finished 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.

We made menorahs using our fingers to make the candles.

Friday, December 2nd

At our greeting circle we did a "5 Little Gingerbread Men" Fingerplay. Today we read Gingerbread Man Loose at the zoo.

For our small group activity, the children were able to pick an ornament and color it for the tree in our entrance in yellow. After they were done the children were able to hang them by themselves on the tree. They were very excited!

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. Our favorite liquid was the milk. After floating for a minute or so, the cookie would slowly sink down into the milk and we liked watching that happen again and again. 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.

Wednesday, November 30

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!"

We did large motor activities in the Kiva today. We worked on balance, threw, caught, and bounced balls, and enjoyed playing with our friends. We also explored how we could use the railing as a ramp for the balls.

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.

In the dramatic play center we had props to pretend to make and decorate gingerbread men.

In the math center we worked on counting, number recognition, and one-to-one correspondence with a gingerbread house game. We chose a number card and added that number of candies to the house to decorate it. Some of us read the numbers on the cards and some of us counted the number of dots on the cards.

In the art center we made gingerbrwad prints by dipping gingerbread cookie cutters into paint and pressing the cookie cutters onto paper. We explored using different colors and lining up our prints or overlapping them on our papers.

Monday, November 28, 2022

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 then used our imaginations to act out making gingerbread.

We read Ninjabread Man during storytime today. We also worked on the letter of the week: Mm. We practiced making the sound for Mm and we created a list of words that start with M.

In our small group activity 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.