Hey Good Lookin What You Got Cookin

This week we learned all about the Kitchen and Nutrition. We learned about the difference between fruits and vegetables and what are foods that are good to eat everyday and foods that are ok to eat on special every now and then. 

We played a game on our smart board where everyone got a chance to come up, choose a food, and decide whether it was a healthy or unhealthy food. I was so impressed with my friends ability to not only name each food but to identify what category it belonged to. 

I decided to shake things up this year and instead of just learning about the kitchen we wanted to integrate some of my favorite books especially since they were all about food. 

Monday we read the story If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. That silly little mouse wanted a cookie and boy what a mess he ended up making. We decided to make some cookies for our mouse but we had to sort and count the chocolate chips write how many if each color an then add them together. To end our math lesson we had to have a special treat of chocolate chip cookies. They may be in the unhealthy catagory, but they were delicious!

After we finished counting chips everyone drew a picture of what they would give the mouse. 

On Tuesday we read if You Give A Moose A Muffin and created our own moose hats. Sadly I forgot to snap a picture, but they were super cute and everyone looked so cute eating their mini donuts in their moose hats. 

On Wednesday we read If You Give A Dog A Donut and created our own cute puppies and once again we had to have a special treat that went along with our story. I think my friends enjoyed their mini chocolate donuts because they were all begging for more.

On Thursday we read If You Give A Pig A Pancake and then we counted chocolate chips in the pancakes and practiced writing our numbers.

For snack I decided to make my friends pancakes of course, but I had to make them in the shape of our letter. Some turned out better than others, but they were still delicious and gluten free so even I could enjoy them (yum yum!)

Later on that day we had a feast of our favorite foods. Each student brought in their favorite food to share with their friends. We had pizza, lac n cheese, cheese dip, pomegranate seeds, yogurts, spaghetti just to name a few of the 20 items we tasted. It was quite the feast! Here you can see everyone gorging themselves. Poor babies slept it off in Thanksgiving rule food comas. I never heard a peep from anyone during nap time.  

Friday was yet again another half day. I found myself once again rushing around to get things ready for next week and to prepare myself for parent teacher conferences big we don't have another 4 day week for quite sometime I will be a happy little teacher. I will take everyday I can get to get everything ready for the next week. 

We read If You Give A Cat A Cupcake and the. Very one made their own unique cupcake. I decided to skip any special treats this day because we had had enough treats the day before. 

For jobs this week we made a Kangaroo K

And a kite k

We followed a Pizza Glyph to create some delicious pizza pies. 

We searched through a pile of leaves to match each letter on bout list and the. We practiced writing all of our letters. 

What a fun and tasty week down in 4k!

Boo!

Once again I am a few days behind, but here it is in all it's Halloween glory! 

Monday we used 4 of our senses to discover what a pumpkin looks like, feels like, smells like, and sounds like. We decided to skip what a pumpkin tastes like for now because the germaphobe in me couldn't take 20 kids licking our poor little pumpkin. Ugh now I have an awful mental age of each kid coming up to take a lick and it makes me shudder! Now you might be saying "Roxanne you chose the wrong profession if you don't like germs", but trust me after being sneezed on by every child you have taught for 12 years really helps desensitize the crazy. And yes I said I have been teaching for 12 years! That blows my mind I have been doing what I love for so long! Oh how time flies when you're having fun!

After we all got a chance to discover the pumpkin with our senses we watched a video all about the life cycle of a pumpkin. Afterwards everyone used their super smart brains and memories to create our own pumpkin cycles. Cute and educational!

Tuesday we read the story Stellaluna. It is a story about a little bat who gets lost and goes to live in a nest of birds. Stellaluna thinks something is wrong with her because she is different then the birds because she is nocturnal and sleeps during the day and flies at night, doesn't like eating bugs, and sleeps upside down so she changes to be like them, but she knows it just doesn't feel right. Long story short Stellaluna finds her mom and realizes that even though they may be different they are still friends. I love this story because I feel like it kind of describes all of us down in 4k. We are all a little different, but we all love each other and are all friends no matter what. It is also a perfect book for us to learn a little about bats. We learned they are nocturnal (sleep at night), they eat fruit and some bats eat insects (just not Stellaluna), and they can see in the dark. After we finished our story we all graphed whether we thought bats were cute or creepy and then we made some awesome bat wing hats!

Wednesday we made our own classroom Jack-O-Lantern and everyone got a chance to help me scoop the goo out. We decided on a super simple BOO! pattern for our orange gourd. 

It seems a little blond monkey got a gold of my phone and deleted some of my Halloween photos. 

Naughty Monkey!

For jobs this week we measured bats with coins, paper clips, and candy corn and practiced writing the numbers.

We counted the dots in each Haunted House window and matched the ghost with the matching number. 

We counted out Halloween erasers. 

And we counted out "pumpkin seeds" which were actually dried corn kernels because Mrs. Roxanne couldn't find any dried pumpkin seeds beside the goopy ones we scooped out of pumpkin and no one wants to count with goopy pumpkin seeds! 

I think my favorite craft we worked in this week is our pumpkin names and Jack-O-Lanterns. We started on Monday by each finger painting a large sheet of paper. I told the kiddos I couldn't find my orange paint so we had to mix red and yellow together to make orange. While our papers dried everyone worked to find the pumpkins that had the letters in their names and they made a little name pumpkin patch. After our papers dried everyone free handed a circle on their orange finger painted papers and then they cut it out. This made for some fun shaped pumpkins which made them even more unique just like each one of our friends. Last, but not least we needed faces for our crazy Jack-O-lanterns. I love how different and unique each one turned out. 

Thursday we celebrated Halloween by dressing up and eating lots of delicious food. Isn't that why you are supposed to do? Our amazing parents put together some delicious and healthy treats which I forgot to snap pictures if amidst the chaos of the day. 1 thing I do want to say is how wonderful the babies were in this crazy day! They are always good listeners, but party days can get a little rowdy and they were fabulous, sweet, and polite. We played Halloween bingo, made some spiders, and ate lots of food. 

I am so sad this picture turned out so blurry because my babies looked so stinkin cute in their costumes. I am just happy most of them were actually looking at me, but I was pretty interesting standing on top of my big blue self in a care bear costume with no shoes. Good times down in 4K!

And if you thought she could do it Mrs. Douglas once again transformed Mr. Bear. He has now become a spooky Vampire!!
Don't worry he may have a life left in him to make it through Thanksgiving!

Hopefully everyone has detoxed from their sugar comas and are taking it easy after all of the Halloween fun!

Power of Prayer

I am sending a shout out to everyone tonight because we have so many people in our school and church family who need some extra prayers right now.

If you haven't figured out just yet, there is something a little special about our school and it is the people it holds. If you are a new parent just give it a little time and you will very soon catch a glimpse of how special this little school is and how important it will become to you and your family. You won't have to wait long I promise. 

So if you get a chance take a moment and please ask God to be with those who need it right now and to give them the strength to have faith in him and his plans for them.

Funny

This was too funny not to post and goes out to anyone who says PreK is just daycare and that we shouldn't get summer off. Every so called "Break" I am working, even on my days off. The best part about it is I absolutely love my job so every second of working my behind off is 100% worth it! 

MONSTERS!

This week we learned all about monsters. We learned that monsters are just pretend and instead of scary they are pretty darn silly. 

Monday we read Go Away Big Green Monster and then created our own colorful monsters. We worked on creating sentences and color sight words by putting the words Go away big _______ monster in order then each student had to match the color word with the color they had colored their monster and trace the word before placing it in their sentence.

Tuesday we read Where the Wild Things Are and created ourselves as Max the King of the wild things then we transcribed what each student likes to do when they feel wild.

Wednesday we followed a Monster Glyph to create silly shape monsters and I am so impressed with how far all of my friends skills have come from where we started at the beginning of the year especially with cutting. It may seem like we do the same things over and over again in different forms sometimes, but repetition is a great way to make sure skill mastery is attained. 

Friday since we were running short on time we worked in our lowercase mouse 

m's

Once again this was a short week and if you read my little rant about loathing short weeks you can tell I wasn't happy that we didn't have another day to fit in more fun games. For jobs this week we made:

Monster M's

Worked on putting some Monster ABC's in order then feeding to our monsters

Measured different sized monsters placed the matching number with each monster, then worked on writing each number. 

Last but not least we counted monsters and matched the corresponding number in the box.

If you can't tell we have been working very hard on number recognition and counting and we are now moving on number writing. We will also be movig into more intensive letter writing activities with a little sight word action thrown in for good measure. 

Good times in 4k!!

The Tooth and Nothing But The Tooth

Last week Dr. Lale came to visit to teach us all about taking care of our teeth. Shattuck and Sam helped read a story and we all got to dress up like dentists with gloves and masks. Everyone got a chance to floss and brush some teeth and we got to pick a treat from the treasure box and Dr. Lale sent us home with brand new toothbrushes and toothpaste. We loved learning all about this special Community Helper!

Thank you Dr. Lale!

Whirlwind

I am just going to say it and you may think I am nuts, but I highly dislike short school weeks!! 4 days is definitely not enough time to get everything done and it is definitely not enough to prepare for the next week.

Most people think preschool is all fun and games and it is, but those fun and games take a lot time and preparation to seem more like fun and less like work. If you have never walked into a classroom full if 20 four year olds without every single thing you might need ready and waiting to go then you are basically walking into a lions den full of lions who haven't eaten in 3 weeks. Four year olds like routine and structure and down time is the worst thing that can happen to a classroom. To make sure this never happens and just incase I can not be at school I spend the entire previous week getting everything and I mean EVERYTHING prepared and layed out for the following week. This means everything is copied, laminated, and in a labeled box or folder ready to go. Now I have a ton of help which makes things much easier, but it still takes us about 4 days to get it all done. 

If you think about it, during a typical 5 day week we usually complete 3 activities first things in the morning (lowercase letter craft, coloring letter person puppet, coloring uppercase and lowercase letter sheet), 4-5 games or crafts that go along with our theme or a book we read, 5 afternoon activities/jobs, letter writing and drawing a picture of something starting with that letter each and every week. That is 13-15 activities all with multiple components all requiring 20 sets!! Holy Moly I just got more exhausted than i already am just typing all of that out. 

Right now I am also working on assessing each one of our babies to prepare for parent teacher conferences coming up in a few weeks. I only have a few assessments left to finish up and the day they are done I will be celebrating with a big ole gluten free pizza and cupcake from Whole Foods! 

Wish me luck and send me prayers that I make it through these next few weeks unscathed! I am looking forward to meeting with all of our wonderful parents so I can tell them what a wonderful job each and every one of their babies are doing, but for now I am going to go cuddle with my girl and not look at this giant notebook anymore!