Five senses

This month, our unit of study is the five senses, and many of our activities - academic and play - are centered around this theme. Whether it's a game matching an object to its sense (cat = touch, rose = smell) or a song describing what we see, smell, taste, etc., this unit is reinforced throughout each day.

Today Mrs. Connie got out the musical instruments, and we played "Guess that sound." They closed their eyes as Mrs. Connie brought out each instrument and played it; then she'd hide it behind her back while they tried to guess it. Items included a drum, jingle bells, maracas, cymbals, and a triangle! After each sound was identified, the children were able to spend a short amount of time playing the instruments (Some were shorter than others ... 14 3-year-olds banging cymbals for 30 seconds is a very. long. time.) ;)

Fun with cymbals!

Ringing bells!

Stay tuned to see what we did next! Here's a hint ...

It may look like a simple coloring project, but it's much more! :)

Teddy Bear Picnic

Last week we had so much fun at our first annual Teddy Bear Picnic! We studied the letter B all week, so it was a perfect time to eat bananas and berries with the brown bears we brought from home!

Berries and bananas were perfect for our B-themed day!

Mrs. Connie planned an extra fun activity--hiding various items around the playground. Our students had to find the things that start with the letter B.

How many B items can you find?

 Here are a few more pictures of our beautiful K3 students enjoying the picnic!

We love our kiddos!

What new fun will we have with the letter C this week? Stay tuned ...

Spanish

Wednesdays are Spanish days in K-3! By using a lot of toys that our students are already familiar with, Mrs. Carlone makes class fun and teaches in a way that makes Spanish easy for the children to remember.

Elmo speaks English and Spanish!

"Hola, amigos," says Elmo!

Mrs. Carlone's color friends. 

Learning parts of the body is easy with silly props!

Doing the color dance. 

Adios, amigos!

The Lesson of the Egg

One of my favorite kids' lessons is one I heard during the children's sermon at our church one Sunday. It is a great way for the kids to visualize this lesson: Though we may look different on the outside, we're all the same on the inside.

We looked closely at one brown egg and one white egg. We even passed the eggs around and let the children do a one-finger touch. They noted that both eggs had hard shells, and both were smooth, but they were two different colors. 

One of our students is especially fascinated by eggs, so this lesson was right up his alley!

Next came the really exciting part - we cracked each egg into a bowl to see what they looked like inside!

They're the same!!

I wish we had a picture of the children's faces - they were amazed! 

Just like these eggs, we may look different on the outside, but we're the same on the inside -- we love our families and friends, we're kind (or at least we try to be!), we hurt, we feel happy and sad. And most importantly, we're God's children and He loves us all!

More about ME!

We continued working on our All About Me unit last week. We decorated stick people to resemble ourselves, and we'll use these throughout the year as our "child of the day" indicators. (We plan to introduce the COTD concept later this week - it's basically the day's helper and line leader.)

Can you pick out your child? ;-)

We also reinforced our first-week study of feelings. The children had a great time changing their expressions to resemble happy, sad, scared, surprised, and excited. 

(Apologies for the blurry photos, but their expressions were too cute -
I wanted to zoom in as much as possible!)

This week, we will begin learning our letters and numbers! And stay tuned for a separate post about one of Mrs. LeeAnne's favorite lessons of the whole year!