Fairy Tale Literature Unit

We just finished our Fairy Tale Literature Unit. We concentrated on two fairy tales: The Fisherman and His Wife and The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Art: 

     Castle: We did a castle directed draw. Then the kids decorated their castles.

     Worn out shoes: The kids decorated a shoe pattern to show what the                princesses and princes shoes looked after dancing all night.

Math:
     Fish Patterns: The students made three different patterns using fish stickers.

     Shoe Patterns: The kids made three different color patterns on the                    shoe outlines.

Language Arts: The students wrote a summary (using first, next, last format) of the story as a group and then they each drew their own pictures to go with the summary.

Science: We drew a magical fish and labeled the eye, mouth, fin, tail, gills, and scales on the fish.

We had a lot of fun learning about fairy tales. 

Dramatic Play Center: Flower Shop

Today I closed the Starbucks Dramatic Play center and opened the St. Mary's Flower Shop Dramatic Play center. I had so much fun making this center. Yesterday, I went to Dollar Tree and bought all kinds of cute items for the flower shop.

I bought flowers...

office supplies...

vases, pots, decorative sticks, decorative gems for vases, Spanish moss, baskets...

seed packets...

ribbon, aprons, cans, gloves, and seed kits.

I put the flowers in vases and cans.

I made business cards, pricing guides, flower making instructions, a business sign, and an hours of operation sign. These are cards to write a message on to send with a flower arrangement. The kids are going to glue the cards on craft sticks so that they can put the cards in flower arrangements.

These are the business cards I made for the flower shop.

Here is the whole center.

Here is the desk complete with a cash register, card reader, check books, a calculator, note pad, receipt book, message tablet, phone and open/closed sign.

Here are some flowers that are for sale.

This is where the kids make the flower arrangements.

There is also a flower making station with instructions on how to make tissue paper flowers. Tomorrow I am going to add directions for how to make cupcake liner flowers.

The kids had so much fun at the Flower Shop today. 

Math Fun With Erasers

We are learning about ladybugs this month. I bought these cute mini bug erasers from Oriental Trading and we did four math activities with them today.

First, we made bug patterns.

Then, we did bug subtraction. We started with 10 and took away 8...

We ended up with 2 bugs.

Then, we practiced addition. Four plus six equals ten. 4 + 6 = 10

2 + 8 =10 

Finally, we made a graph out of our bugs and we talked about what we had the most of and the least of.

Teacher Time: Seaport Village

Our school recently had our annual auction. This year there was a silent auction for "teacher time". The teacher gets to choose an activity to do on a weekend with a students and one of his friends and families bid on it. This year I decided to take the kids to Seaport Village and ride the carousel, have hot cocoa and read books at the Upstart Crow book store, and then take a ferry ride to Coronado and have a picnic lunch by the beach. We had so much fun!

Here we are the the Upstart Crow.

The boys chose a book to buy.

We rode the carousel.

We took the ferry to Coronado. The boys liked looking at the Midway from the ferry.

This is us on the beach at Coronado.

We had a great day!

Advent

We made these cute advent wreaths last week to help us prepare for Jesus' birth. The kids made fingerprint holly berries on their wreaths.

At our religion center we have advent candles that we light during prayer time each morning. When we light the candles, we sing the song Light One Candle. Here is the first verse:

Light one candle for hope.

One bright candle for hope.

He brings hope to every heart, 

He comes! He comes!

Below is a picture of our classroom religion center. I change the table cloth for the different liturgical seasons; right now the table cloth is purple because we are in the season of Advent.

We also have an advent calendar. We open a new door each day during calendar time.

We also have an Advent chain. Each link has a name that Jesus is called in the Bible such as The Good Shepherd, Savior, Prince of Peace, etc... We remove one link each day and I ask the kids to tell me some of the names of Jesus that were on previous links.

Our Christmas play is coming up in a few days. Look for the post about our play soon. 

More Brown Bear, Brown Bear

We did a couple more activities to go with our Brown Bear Unit. We made a list of words from the book and put the words in ABC order.

We also reread the book and used cut outs of the animals to show what page we were on in the story. For example, when we read the page about the red bird, the kids who had a red bird cut out showed the rest of the group their red bird.

Holy Week

We did some awesome activities for Holy Week. I found some great ideas on the blogs called Catholic Icing and Catholic Inspired. For Palm Sunday, the kids made torn paper palm branches. I drew the outline of a palm branch on black paper and the kids tore pieces of green paper and glued them onto the black paper. 

We also did this stations of the cross activity from Catholic Inspired.

We made this Communion craft when we talked about the Last Supper.

We talked about Veronica's veil and then the kids made their own version on a 4"x4" piece of muslin cloth.

On Holy Thursday, we talked about the washing of the feet and created this craft. We used our fists and fingerprints to make small feet.

We also made Resurrection Rolls on Holy Thursday.

Throughout the week, we worked on Holy Week in Fingerprints which I adapted from this activity on the Catholic Icing Blog. It turned out to be a cute keepsake for the parents.

We also made this Golgotha Scene for our classroom. I had the kids gather rocks, dirt, and sticks and then we placed them inside a clay saucer.

This is the finished project. It is still at out religion center in our classroom.

It was a busy week, but the kids learned a lot about Jesus' last few days.