To end our week, we had cultural day and learned all about Africa! At circle time, we watched a short clip of Sesame Street that taught us the geography and other things about the continent. In our activities, we got to talk about different animals that live in the African jungle. We matched pictures of fur and skin to the names of the animal. In our second group, we made bracelets by threading beads onto yarn using the colors of the African flag. Our last activity, we got to color the African flag by matching the colors in it. We had a great Friday!

We're back! We had so much fun yesterday, we completely forgot to share with all of you.
Today, during circle time we watched a video of the book, The Greedy Triangle.  For our first small group, we used magnetic triangle blocks to create patterns and build different types of towers. For our second small group, we used a triangle trunk and triangle cut outs of leaves to create a triangle tree! For our final small group, we put puzzles together by forming the shape and its title. We had a wonderful Wednesday.

New week, new theme! This week we are going to talk about shapes. To start, we read The Shape of Things at circle time. We worked on our fine motor skills in our first activity by using clothespins to indicate the matching shapes. In our second group, we explored the sensory bin. It was filled with many examples of squares and we compared their differences and similarities. In our last group, we worked with play-doh and cookie cutters to make shapes. We also got to celebrate the birthday of one of our friends! Happy birthday!

We had an awesome week learning all about apples. We read a book called Up, Up, Up, It's Apple Picking Time, and it told us more about apple orchards and some of the different kinds of apples there are. Did you know that there are more than 7,500 different varieties of apples? We decided to trade our activities for extra time on the playground today to take advantage of the beautiful weather. We hope you have a great weekend!

We are "eating up" this apple week! We read Big Red Apple at circle time, and talked about how apples grow on their trees. In our first activity, we laced apples with pipe cleaner "worms." In our second group, we identified and traced numbers that were written on apples. Our last group did a neat experiment. We put pieces of apples in different liquids, such as vinegar, salt water, and baby oil and made predictions about what might happen to them. We let them soak for the rest of the day and examined them after our nap to see if our predictions were correct!

At circle time today we read Amazing Apples, it described all the details of apple trees and how they grow their fruit! In our first small group, we practiced our fine motor skills by ripping up red construction paper and gluing it to a paper plate to make apples. We even added a stem and a leaf. In our second group, we identified numbered baskets and used ink to put that many fingerprint apples in each basket. In our last group, we made an apple volcano! We worked together to put baking soda, vinegar, and water color inside a cored out apple. We talked about the reaction we saw and whether it changed the apple or not. Today was a wonderful day!