A New House

We began our week with homes, houses, and habitats as our theme, discussing A New Home from our children's Bible, a lesson from Genesis 12-17. 
After introducing the children to this story we decided to paint pictures of the homes we lived in.  Naturally, this also gave us opportunity to observe the colors gray, green, black, brown, and white.
 We had LOTS of colors available including our glitter, because my little preschoolers LOVE glitter.

As all the other children happily painted their interpretations of the homes they lived in, my little one proudly exclaimed, "I'm painting the OCEAN!"  She had no interest in our objective and she enthusiastically completed her colorful waterscape that we displayed on our window for many days.

Throughout the course of the day and week we also discussed different books we have around the classroom that talk about houses, homes, and habitats.  The children LOVE, love, love the story of the Three Little Pigs and The Big Bad Wolf.  We read this book in addition to MY personal favorite, The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton each day as a part of our circle/table times. 

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We enjoyed opportunities to watch this reading on Youtube by Scholastic.  There are much scarier versions out there!!  This one is pretty good and from a reputable company.  You can click the arrow in the middle to enjoy it with your preschooler at home too!

We made our own Three Little Pig houses with the straw we saved from our Halloween hay bale from last season (you know us pre-k teachers, we save everything!). We folded construction paper into the shape of a hollow square to give the children a solid base to glue the straw to and placed it on top of another piece of paper. We practiced huffing, and puffing, and BLOWING our little straw houses down to their giggles and glee!! It was SOOOO CUTE :))

This is one of our little straw houses :)

We did this fun little letter "H" activity after our hay houses and we practiced lots of "H" sound practice! I drew lines matching the popsicle sticks onto the paper and the children simply matched the sticks to the lines to make their own "H."

One sweet little story...

The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton is on my personal top ten lists for children.  I love the detailed pictures, the changing seasons, but most of all the morals of the story.  There are a couple going on  in this book that older children and adults will also enjoy.  First, the longing to discover what we do not know or have that we later learn wasn't as glamorous as we had hoped, leaving us longing for "the way things used to be."  In other words...a lesson in appreciating what we have, while we have it. 
The second moral of this sweet tale is just because something is old and looks like it is no longer useful, if it is cared for and loved it can regain its former strength, beauty, and usefulness.  I LOVE this precious, classic piece of children's literature.    It's a long read for a 2 year old, but for 3's and up, it is a must read!

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Our week went here....our week went there...

The magical appearance of acorns gave us lots to talk about regarding habitats. The squirrels are EVERYWHERE and give us an up close look at the changing seasons with lots of question and answer sessions about what the squirrels are doing, what they eat, and where they live. This has gone along beautifully with our daily discussions about "new homes." Some of our children have also moved recently, have lived in apartments, have slept in tents while camping, and understand that animals live in homes that are different than ours. We also, having an overwhelming abundance of acorns, have been utilizing the acorns sizes, shapes, and sheer numbers for math exercises this week. We compared smaller, medium and large acorns. We practiced counting from 1 to 100...we had WAY more than 100! We practiced 1-10 matching the numbers to the correct number of acorns. Adding and subtracting 1 to see what we had "all together" and "left" gave us some pause. And their all time favorite acorn math activity was to place them all in a row and then to scatter them as quickly as possible, then to place them neatly in a row all over again.

They love the bling! Glitter paint on the letter "H."

We studied the letter "H" for house. With the barefoot quality weather, however, the children preferred practicing all kinds of letter creation outdoors. We wrote all our little ones names on the stone patio, practiced our downward and sideways strokes on the deck, placed our sticks together in the dirt to make the letter "H," drew our "H's" in the sand, and in the dirt. Another fun outdoor letter activity was trying to spot letter "H's" naturally made by the branches in the trees. We did manage to spot a few, but getting pictures of these prior to them being snapped in two, was...well...unsuccessful :)).

A little counting, placement, and recognition.

Just a few of my favorite moments...

Sharing can be a challenging practice of patience for little ones (and big ones too!!) Not this time, they encouraged one another to sit together and read their books. They would take turns getting down and the one in the chair would pat the itty, bitty bit of space next to him or her and the other would climb back on board! :)) SOOOOO Sweet!!

This sweet little sugar sat for about 30 minutes just peeling the papers from the crayons. She was so content in her detailed objective that I couldn't resist. After all...we can make them into "new" crayons!

We also made some Three Little Pig stick houses, but I was unable to snap a pic. After this project they wanted to play with the leftover sticks. They lined them up, counted, added them together, made them into triangles, and squares and neatly lined them up again.

That's a Wrap!

We made short work of last week with our many conversations, projects, playtimes, stories, songs, math observations, and teamwork.  We had our tantrums and tears, our ups and downs, some teething, bumps and scrapes. 

We snuggled and laughed, painted and danced, enjoyed some of the few remaining hot days of the year and played for probably the last time this year in the sprinklers. 

Our favorite moment as a school family was welcoming back our friend from her break as we celebrated her second birthday together.  Welcome back!! 

I wish you well and I hope you get to play today.

-L