Feelings and outtakes

As we began our first full week of school, we introduced the concept of feelings. Mrs. Connie used a poster to show the differences between happy, sad, scared, excited, and nervous, then we polled the children to see how they had felt on their first day of school.

We made this happy face/sad face hand puppet to illustrate different feelings.

A K-3 tradition ... reading "The Kissing Hand" and receiving Kissing Hand cookies from Mrs. Connie!

As you'll see from this blog, as well as from many of our different craft projects, Mrs. LeeAnne loves taking pictures! We decorated these frames as a special gift for parents to use with our first-day pictures (check out the bulletin board outside our classroom to see the finished products). Before we put our pictures in them, we tried taking the kids' photos. We did manage to get some cute shots, but these outtakes are even funnier ...

Music lovers!

K-3 is blessed that Mrs. Connie is not only a wonderful teacher, but also a gifted musician! The students love it when she plays the piano; sometimes they sing along and sometimes we all play instruments together. Today, after singing the ABC's, Mrs. Connie broke into a rendition of "Let It Go," to the delight of the Frozen lovers in our group. As most of the girls sang along, these two friends started dancing together.

And here's some video of our parade earlier in the week. We love playing music!

First week FUN!

We've had a great first week! Monday was the first day all of our students came for all of the day. We've spent the time learning new friends' names, getting to know the school day routine, and most importantly having lots of fun!

Monday morning play-dough was a big hit!

The train table is everyone's favorite!

This boy loves his dinosaurs!

We're so happy that the children are already forming friendships!

Play-dough fun on a rainy morning.

Pillow pets make story time even more special!

First paint project of the year!

Tomorrow we'll share some of the first-week craft projects we've done, plus some hilarious "outtakes." We're off to a terrific start in K-3!!

First days of school

Welcome to a new school year! We hope our kiddos are as excited about starting school as we are! Judging from these photos, everyone had a great phase-in!

Resurrection Rolls

One of our favorite Easter activities is making Resurrection Rolls with the little ones. It's a great way to illustrate the process by which Christ was annointed and buried inside a tomb, and what happened after three days.

We began by giving each student a piece of raw, refrigerated biscuit dough. They loved being able to flatten it with their hands!

It was harder than it looked!

Next we dipped large marshmallows into melted butter, to represent annointing Christ's body with oil.

After the butter, our "bodies" were dipped into a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, representing the spices used for annointing.

Seal the biscuits tightly around the marshmallow, and they're ready for the oven!

We let the baking process represent the three days Jesus spent in the tomb. When we opened our biscuits, they were empty, just like Christ's tomb!

This project is meaningful and delicious!