Fours Room News

Monday, February 9, 2015

What's This About The Groundhog?

Happy Groundhog Week!

We had a fun time learning about the groundhog and his special holiday!

Ask your child:

Where does a groundhog live? burrow

What does a groundhog eat? fruit/veggies, grass, grains, clovers, greens

When he is in danger what does the groundhog do? whistles

What are the groundhog's other two names? Whistle Pig & Woodchuck

On February 2nd, what happens if the groundhog sees his shadow? He gets scared and runs back into his burrow

What happens if the groundhog does not see his shadow? He stays out and spring will come soon!

We had fun making our own Groundhog Puppets and learning a fun Groundhog Poem

We spent a lot of the week talking about what makes a shadow. We talked about how the sun shines on us, but it cannot shine THROUGH us. We practiced this concept by making animal shadows on the wall.

The children loved this rhyming poem by Robert Louis Stevenson!

Rhyming leads to better phonemic awareness and helps them hear the pattern and structure in spoken or written words. It has also been proven that rhyming helps prepare children to read!

Here is a youtube video I recently found that would be fun to share with your child!

My Shadow - Disney Version

We sure had a great week of learning together!

These are just a few highlights, but our days are always filled with unexpected surprises!

Monday, February 2, 2015

All Aboout The Arctic

We had a fun week talking about the Arctic! A highlight was learning about the Northern Lights. Miss Chantal made us a short DVD of the lights to watch in class and then we did an art project using crayons and black watercolors!

The class was fascinated watching the northern lights and they asked to watch it again and again! You can view it at home too! Here is the link!

The Amazing Northern Lights

We are moving right along with the alphabet! This week was the letter R! It's exciting to see everyone's penmanship coming along so nicely!

We had a Rabbit Relay Race in the classroom. The children hopped down to a block, made the letter R sound, and then hopped back to the next child in line!

"Mr. Freeze Castle"

"Floating on an iceberg"

Using sugar cubes and arctic animals was a highlight of the week!

The children had a great time using their imaginations and cognitive skills to build their own ice structures!

A list of items we "froze."

The Arctic has a lot of ice so we decided to do a simple experiment. I asked the children to name some things from our Joyful Noise kitchen that we could put in the freezer to see if they would freeze. After sitting overnight, it was fun to take it out the next day to see what froze solid and what didn't! Look at the list above and ask your child to name one thing that froze and one that didn't.

Another highlight was "ice cube painting!"

We froze tempera paint overnight and then used it to paint a picture!

As the paint melted the colors became more rich and vibrant.

We sure had a fun week!

Thursday, January 22, 2015

SNOW!

Ask your child, "Why does it snow?"

This week we have been talking all about snow! Your child learned that when it is very cold, water drops inside the clouds freeze then they fall down as snowflakes!

We had a great time reading, "The Snowy Day" and doing a journaling activity that focused on helping the children connect literature they read to real life.

Here are a few more learning highlights!

This week we have been working on writing the letter Q!

It's fun to paint snowmen made with shaving cream and glue!

Snowflake counting and number recognition!

Our Bible lesson focused on the good friendship between King David and Jonathan. As a group we discussed what it means to be a good friend. The children made happy and sad faces and when shown a picture the children either held up their happy or sad picture depending on whether or not the children were being a good friend or not.