Friends Around the World and "O" Week

This week our unit was scheduled to be "Friends Around the World" and the letter "O".  If I have learned nothing else from teaching pre-school for the last 16+ years, I have learned that things change!  And change they did this week!   I did start off the week planning to stick to my lesson plan of "Friends Around the World" by talking about the amazing country of Italy and Leonardo Da Vinci.  We looked at the beautiful flag of Italy and discussed the meaning of each of the colors.

Green - Hope, Joy and Love

White - Peace and Honesty

Red - Hardinesss, Bravery, Strength and Valour

But of course if you are a preschooler, when you see an Italian flag you automatically think of Francesco Bernooulli!

Ahhhhhh, the power of media!

We also talked about Michelangelo his wonderful sculptures and art.  I had several wonderful pictures of the Sistine Chapel and the students loved looking at them.  It's fun to look at pictures of great art, but how about let's make some Michelangelo art of our own!  We hit the floor for this lesson and drew UNDER the tables! (Edited because this crazy teacher wrote Leonardo de Vinci instead of Michelangelo!)

As soon as I said "u"nder the tables, several students yelled "under starts with U"!  OHHHHHH they remembered last week's letter of the week, "U"!  A sweet teacher moment for sure.  Some of the children would have stayed under the tables for the entire day, others spent only a few minutes on their art and they were ready to move on.  It didn't really matter because we all had a wonderful day!

Tuesday we talked about the letter "O".  We spent the making the "O" sound and laughing.  For some reason making the "O" sound is extremely funny.  It was a very happy day in our classroom.  We did a very impressive art project on Tuesday.  We started with a plain black piece of construction paper and covered it with chalk.

Next, we poured black paint on the bottom and let it run off the top of the paper.

Everyone loved letting the paint dripped into the garbage can!

After it dried we added a little owl, a moon and lots of stars!

The end results were nothing short of amazing!

It is hard for me to believe that these were done by 3 and 4 year old children!  

BUT THEY DID IT ALL BY THEMSELVES!

I'm ending this posts now because as I said earlier, "things change".  The rest of our week was devoted to Leap Year and good 'ole Dr. Seuss' Birthday.