First we worked with 2D paper shapes to create fantastic animal pictures! As we learned about 2D vs. 3D shapes, we observed the differences by sculpting shapes with playdoh! Our sorting and graphing skills were also practiced with our Shape Sorting Chart, as we continued to learn the difference between 2D and 3D.

We continued to fill in our Number Book with the number 2. We also practiced drawing shapes, tracing lines and also drawing them freehand!

One of our favorite activities was our walk around the building, observing all the shapes we could spot in different objects — like the chair with all the triangles in its back! We used our shape knowledge to create a couple of games, too! We correlated shapes to real live objects with our Spin & Cover Game, and then we made our own 3D Shapes Bingo cards!

We began the week by preparing our February calendars. Each month we have so much fun decorating the tops of our calendars with our themed pictures!

Our graphing and counting skills were taken to a new level this week. We used dice to count, racing to the highest number on our cards. We also created special dice with different vehicles on the faces, rolling those and charting the results!

Everyone was excited to talk about vehicles this week, and also excited to make them! Our Dump Truck Craft was a hit, with a paper truck that hinges on a brass brad! The favorite activity was undoubtedly our car design. We explored wheels and axles, attaching them to a cardboard base, and then used our creativity to personalize and design the rest of the car! See how fast your child’s car can roll!

Book: Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site

Much of our shadow exploration began with experiments with light. Using flashlights, we tested different materials to see which ones light was able to shine through and which blocked light entirely. Our Light Shines Through craft was the culmination of our experiments, creating a suncatcher to hang in the window!

As we continued to practice writing letters and numbers, we also worked hard on our cutting skills this week by cutting out shadow puppet shapes! We tested our observation skills as well with a groundhog shadow matching puzzle.

Our book this week: Moonbear’s Shadow by Frank Asch

Hearts were everywhere in our projects this week, from creating color chromatography hearts for a garland to our colorful fizzy heart science experiment! We even used heart shapes for a counting and graphing exercise, dropping buttons into different colored zones and putting the results into a chart.

Since many valentines are sent through the mail, we also practiced sorting and measuring pieces of mail and created our own letters to pretend to mail.

The best activity of the week was creating our own Valentine’s Mailboxes, perfect for the delivery of valentines from everyone in class!

We may draw and decorate with heart shapes, but that isn’t the only type of heart! This week we learned all about the hearts and skeletons in our bodies!

To explore how our hearts work, we began with exercising and discovering how to feel our own heartbeats. We also created a model of a heart with jars, balloons, water, and straws, pumping “blood” when we pressed them!

Skeletons were also a big part of the week. In addition to exploring how a skeleton is necessary for our bodies to be able to stand and move, we also did some experiments that showed us just how useful it is to have joints like our knees and elbows.

Our literacy, math, and fine motor practice also went into our activities about hearts and skeletons. In addition to letter and number practice, we counted q-tip “bones” for our x-ray craft and carefully cut and applied yarn for colorful circulatory systems!

Our book this week: Dem Bones by Bob Barner

Cacti were a big part of our explorations in both science and math. We practiced matching silly cactus shapes, identifying the differences between them. We also “built” a pool noodle cactus by rolling our dice, counting, and adding toothpick spines! While we discussed spines, we also experimented to see how spines help a cactus by casting shadows and observing water evaporation from cactus sponges.

One of the favorite activities was our “Rattle”snake Design project. We learned about how these snakes have a special warning system, then created our own snakes and designed rattles for the ends of their bodies! Lots of testing went into finding the perfect rattle design.

Sequins and stickers became gems and jewels as we patterned and created crowns fit for royalty. We also explored the science of salt absorption by creating beautiful salt and glue art pictures!

A hungry unicorn helped us develop some early reading skills as we practiced rhymes — we used our rhyming cards to find images of rhyming objects to put into the unicorn’s mouth! It was very silly and very fun.

We also put our developing engineering skills to work as we designed a slide for a tower rescue. It was tricky to build since we wanted to make a safe slide for our fairy tale characters to use, but we did a lot of testing so we could make changes that made our slides better!

As we imagined the shapes we sometimes see in the clouds when we look up at the sky, we mixed up some special shaving cream puffy paint and painted pictures of those clouds! What was your child’s cloud shaped like?

Being able to identify different types of clouds can tell us a lot about the weather, so we created our very own Cloud Inspector tools, with a special window for looking through to see the types of clouds we see in the sky! Use your cloud inspector when you check the weather and see if you can identify the types of clouds.

We also simulated a heavy rain cloud by creating our Cloud Jars, dripping colorful water through shaving cream clouds until they became so heavy the color “rained” into the clear water below. As we talked about rain, we also worked on our graphing skills by recording data about who likes rain and who doesn’t.

Our Rain Name Craft helped us develop our literacy and fine motor skills, and we also worked on sounding out the beginning sounds of words and finding the letter they begin with!

We began with finally finishing our number books, which was very exciting! Bringing home the books we made with our number practice was something the class had really been looking forward to ever since we began the project! We worked on number identification even more with our Cookie Number Jars, and even introduced the idea of fractions with our Cookie Fraction Puzzles.

Shapes were a big part of this week, especially 2D vs 3D shapes, which we demonstrated in our Ice Cream Cone craft.

We had so much fun exploring balance as well, stacking and carrying pool noodle “cookies,” which was a lot trickier than we thought! We had to move very carefully and strategically stack the cookies to make sure they didn’t fall over!

Spring has sprung! So many changes happen at the start of spring, and we are so excited to see green leaves and colorful flowers begin to pop up outside!

To celebrate the plants we see growing outside, we decided to plant our own! After decorating clear cups with silly faces, we planted and watered grass seeds. We will continue to check on our Grass Head Cups in the coming weeks, and as the grass grows long and looks like silly green hair, we can give our Grass Heads a haircut!

In addition to continuing letter practice, we also continued to work on rhyming! This time, we played a special Rhyme Time Bingo, which was very fun. Ms. Marta would hold up a card with an object, and we had to find a rhyming object on our bingo boards. Our April calendars were also created this week, which included a lot of number writing.

We also explored how roots work, connecting cups of colored water with paper towels. Then, we watched as the paper towel roots drank up the water and carried it up to the top part of the plants! This was a great experiment that helped us understand how our grass seeds will send down roots and then carry water up to the grass

First, we discussed what we know about animals who are pets and animals who are wild. Where do they live? What do they eat? As we explored, we also sorted animal cards into habitats, making observations about their color or their bodies that would help us understand the type of habitat they come from.

We worked on graphing skills again, this time with an animal spinner that helped us determine what to fill in on the graph. We also practiced numbers with animal clip cards, but this time, it was missing numbers in a sequence that we had to find! Definitely tricker than just counting, but we were up for the challenge.

Our favorite activities this week were definitely creating our own animal masks and then pretending to be zoologists who discovered a new species of animal! Our animal discoveries were super silly as we mixed and matched body parts, creating some unique creatures with our imaginations!

As our Grass Head Cups continue to grow, we talked about the different parts of a plant by labeling the flowers in a craft! We also made a special flower vase craft that we can put real flowers into at home. Since we are seeing new, green leaves pop up outside, we used those to explore what makes them green: chlorophyll! We used green leaves as a special paint, creating pictures with that green chlorophyll.

Springtime is also a time when we see birds outside more often, searching for yummy worms and other food. Since birds have many types of beaks, we explored different beak shapes (clothespins, spoons, chopsticks) and different types of food (rubber band worms, plastic bead seeds) to learn more about how a bird’s beak works and how they pick up food!

Since spring is also a very windy time of year, our engineering project of the week was to design kites! Make sure to test your kite outside and see how high you can make it fly!

We began by sorting image cards that showed things that are good and bad for the planet, discussing them as we sorted. We worked on our scissor skills as well, cutting along lines of different shapes, and then practiced numbers with our Recycling Number Puzzles.

Exploring materials was important for this week, especially as we simulated pollution in water and tried to find the best way to filter the water so that it was clean. Ask your child about the water filtering experiment and what we discovered!

Since recycling is an important part of taking care of the earth, we spent a lot of time upcycling different recyclables! We worked on our fine motor skills as we wove plastic shopping bags to create bowls, and then we used recyclables to create devices that will help us pick up litter!

Springtime brings out some of our favorite insects, like butterflies and ladybugs! We learned all about how a caterpillar changes into a butterfly with our Metamorphosis Sequencing Craft. We also created ladybugs and used our dice to roll and count the number of spots to add to the ladybug’s wings!

Our literacy activities this week focused on reading a letter, sounding it out, and then creating that letter either from playdoh or with a dry erase marker! We also created our May calendars, getting lots of extra practice with writing in all the numbers for the month!

We discovered that some insects are good at jumping, so we tested and measured our own jumps to compare with different bugs. We also tried to think like spiders, who are master engineers, by designing and building our own spiderwebs that would help us catch food!

We became city planners as we designed our own cities from paper, mapping out roads, parks, and buildings. Dentists help us take care of our teeth, so we counted and scrubbed tooth images to work on our math skills. We even created a chemical reaction to “put out” a tissue paper fire, which fizzed and bubbled and was really fun! We took all of the ideas from the different community helpers and created our own community helper puppets.

We also began creating a special book to help us remember preschool… stay tuned for more!

Our book this week: When I Grow Up by P.K. Hallinan

We were inspired by the colorful fish in the ocean as we used some unusual painting tools to paint colorful scales: celery and carrots! We also simulated underwater volcanoes with colorful “lava” that erupted into the icy cold ocean.

Our literacy skills were sharpened by counting the syllables of sea creature names and matching those to certain colors of crayons as we colored the images. We also practiced creating our own patterns, exploring how to make them more complex.

The shark teeth craft was a favorite activity, as we cut zigzag teeth for our paper sharks, learning that sharks have multiple rows of teeth!

Our book this week: I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry

We used our sense of sight to spot similarities and differences among our classmates’ clothing colors and patterns, and we made our own binoculars to help us focus as we made visual observations. Our stretchy oobleck was fun to touch and play with, and we had a really fun time trying to figure out the objects in the mystery bag! We weren’t allowed to look inside as we touched items, described them, and tried to figure out what they were!

Painting with spices and other smelly kitchen substances was really fun and we enjoyed making a mess as we created these unusual pictures.

We even did a special Five Senses Scavenger Hunt, practicing our data recording and chart skills.

Our book this week: My Five Senses by Aliki

We graphed our summer plans, practiced letter and sound matching, and used our math skills to roll and count the seeds we added to our watermelon crafts. We even made calendars to use for the summertime months, challenging ourselves to fill in missing numbers as we completed the calendar pages.

Our Preschool Memory Books were also finished this week, and we practiced lots for our special party, rehearsing some special songs to perform for our families.

It’s been a great year of laughing, learning, and having lots of fun together! We will miss everyone and hope everyone has a safe and happy summer!