Miss McCabe's 4K Classes 2013-14: Snow is on its way!

Hello 4K Families,
We hope that you had a great Thanksgiving! We're excited to be back and are getting in the holiday spirit! This week we will be talking about winter and snowmen. Today the children were introduced to our elf on the shelf. They were very excited to meet him! Santa sent him to watch over us and make sure that we are good boys and girls.

Our friends were introduced to Igloo Ii today as well. We learned that Ii is a tricky letter and can make two different sounds!

We also read the book Three Snow Bears. This was a cute story, which was based off of the book Goldilocks and the Thee Bears. However, in this story there is a girl who is an Eskimo instead of Goldilocks and instead of three brown bears, this story had three polar bears.

We also did some counting today. Miss McCabe sang a special snowman song and the children had to count how many times she clapped to figure out which number snowman the mom needed. This was a simple and fun game that the children enjoyed. You could try it at home too. The song is sung to the tune of "5 Little Ducks" and goes as follows:

Ten little snowmen went out one day
Over the hills and far away
When their mother clapped _______
Only the number ______ came back.

While doing this song, we had snowmen with numbers so the children could connect the number they counted to the number symbol. You could do this without the visual or choose to make your own snowmen as a visual.

Centers are back this week! Your child will visit one center each day in a rotation. Ask your child which center he/she attended today.

In the first center, the children played a snowman concepts game. The children took turns picking cards and they either had to identify a concept or complete a silly winter task. The children played the game until all of the cards were gone. This game was differentiated, meaning that some of the cards in one group might focus on colors or shapes, while other group's cards might focus on number or letter recognition.

The children at the second center made their Igloo Ii Alpahbet Booklet Page. Each child cut our rectangles and glued them on the letter Ii. They also used glitter paint to make it sparkly like snow.

At the third center, the children made a snow scene. Each child at this center tore white paper and glued it on the bottom of their paper as the snow. They also cut out three rectangles and triangles to glue onto the paper to form trees. Throughout this activity we talked about the differences between triangles and rectangles, as some of our friends still have difficulty with this. They also got to add some snowflakes to their paper using the end of a pencil and some white paint.

The children at the last center stamped some paper using holiday stamps and they also played a snowball number toss game. Each child got to throw a snowball and record which numbered hole he/she threw their snowball through on their recording sheet. This activity was also differentiated, meaning that some children were working on recognition of smaller numbers such as 0-10 and others were working on higher numbers such as 11-15. This was a fun way for our friends to practice number recognition.

During playtime, some of our friends started making their holiday stockings.

Some other children had fun making snowmen.

We also had some gingerbread play dough out at playtime. It smelled wonderful!

Some of our other friends enjoyed playing in our sensory table. This week we have styrofoam packing peanuts. The morning class had fun sorting the packing peanuts by color. Thank you to those of your that donated these for our classroom!