School updates...

For the next few weeks we will focus on a winter unit. We talk about the changes we see in the weather and the environment. We'll learn about animals in winter. We'll learn about migration and hibernation. Our cooking activities will involve warm comfort foods like soups.

This week we made a batch of snow dough. We've had fun using it to build snow people and pretending to make animal tracks or having our cars and trucks get stuck in the snow. We've painted winter pictures at the easel with blue and white paint and added silver glitter for a snow effect. We have also been gathering sticks to make winter trees pictures. Tomorrow we will paint with ice paint.

We've been reading and listening on cd to different versions of the folktale Stone Soup. Tomorrow we will make our own stone soup.

This week we'll read Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice which is a fun story that introduces the changes of the seasons as well as learning the months of the year. We'll also make a batch of chicken soup with rice. I expect it to be a bigger hit than our stone soup which was fun to make, but not so very appealing for some of the friends to eat.

Today we read Katy and the Big Snow. We had a fun sensory experience using shaving cream as snow to drive the cars and trucks through.

We learned a couple of new games. One is a memory card game with winter pictures to test our recall skills and the other is an alphabet game to help us work on letter and sound recognition. We put together our winter bulletin board by tracing our arms to make trees and paint white paint with cotton swabs to represent snow. We are making ice collages to hang on the trees. We put different pieces of nature in pans with water. Then set them outside. We hope that with tonight's freezing temperatures they will turn to ice. We learned that it has to be below 32 degree for the water to start freezing. We'll check on them in the morning.

Yesterday we read The Snowy Day and talked about what fun things we would like to do in the snow like the little boy, Peter. Today we read Chicken Soup with Rice and practiced saying the months of the year. We talked about which month our birthdays were in and took turns standing up when our month was called.

Next week we will read two of my favorite stories, The Little Red Hen and Bread and Jam for Francis. We'll also attempt to make our own homemade bread.

We've been talking a lot about winter weather as well as experiencing it first hand. We have been looking at pictures of Alaska and igloos. Today we made our own igloos with sugar cubes and glue. We pretended the cubes were blocks of ice. Amazingly, no one tried to sample the blocks. The igloos are drying on the sensory table and can go home with you. Have a great long weekend. See you on Tuesday. We will start to talk about animals in winter.