Mrs. Karen's Preschool Ideas: Farm Week

This past week turned out to be even more exciting than usual. Our unit was "The Farm" and after a very fun week of discussing Dr. Seuss, I knew I had to bring in some extra fun. Little did I know, some of the other teachers were helping me out! With that said, I have to start with our "Fabulous Fun Friday". The four-year classes were talking about animals and pets last week and Mrs. Emily had one of her friends stop by and talk with us about puppies.

(The amazing Mrs. Emily is on the left!)

She brought wonderful pictures and told us all about mother and daddy dogs and they care for their puppies. Then she showed us her surprise!

PUPPIES!

We even got to pet them and give them a little preschool love! Of course everyone went home and told their parents they wanted a puppy! OOOPPS! THANKS MRS. EMILY FOR INCLUDING US!!!!!!

Back in our room we busy talking about the letter "R". We worked on one of my favorite art projects - a red recycled rabbit!

He/she was really easy to make thanks to some recycled toilet tissue tubes and lots of red paint! The eyes are stickers (everyone had to find a matching pair of eyes!), the feet are cut from cereal boxes and he/she has a cotton ball tale. SUPER FUN!

Talking about the farm is fun but it is really hard to explain to children the art of milking a cow. So instead of talking, we milked a cow!

Yes, that is me holding a rubber glove and the cutie milking the rubber glove is my buddy Max! I pricked tiny holes in some rubber gloves and my glass pretended to milk a cow. It was great fun, messy but fun!

I'll continue our week in reverse order and show you what happened in our class on Thursday! I've had a box of interlocking cubes in my room for over a week now. Mostly the students just connected them together and that was fine, it was a good work out for our fine motor skills. But, on Thursday I got sneaky! Before they got to class I made a pattern with the cubes and set it on the table. Of course that was the first thing everyone saw when they came in the door. The next thing I knew the entire class was sitting the floor trying to make their very own patterns!

I had to crop this picture to show you the SMILE on JB's face!

HE WAS SO PROUD!!!!

I had to pry some of them away from the cubes to work on our art project, but since we were cutting with scissors, no one really minded.

As you can see, the students wrote the word, "cow" and cut the cow's spots all by themselves! (Just a note: I don't insist that my class write, I simply encourage it and let them give it a try!)

Writing words seemed to be extra fun this week because we also wrote the word FARM on our hand print animal project!

I especially like this farm scene.

The child didn't want the sheep to be with the horse and cow!

This child wanted his fence to be broken!

I don't do many of the same projects year and year. I always seem to find something that I think would be more fun. BUT, one of this week's art project was so much I do it every year! First, we paint a pink pig -

Then we had some mud!

Okay, it is really brown paint, oatmeal, sand and glue!

And we have some really muddy pigs!

My class loves to cut with scissors! I have never had a class that gets so excited about cutting. We made a quick horse this week and it was the perfect opportunity to hand them the scissors