We are Wild About the Zoo!

What a fun week we have had!  I think we spent more time this past week just "talking" about our topic than ever before.  Zoo Week was just plain fun!  Our circle times were lively and not only full of questions, but animal sounds too!  Here are just a few highlights from our busy week.

We celebrated "Earth Day" on Monday.  We talked about "reusing" items to help protect our planet.  One of the things that we do in my class is recycle lunch containers.  It seems that at least one child brings applesauce to school each day in a disposable container.

The students love to rinse them out for me so we can use them to hold paint or glue when we do an art project.  It may not seem like much but we are trying to do our part!  In case you missed it, here are a couple of our beautiful recycled spring flower -

 

Everyone loves monkeys so our very first zoo art project had to be a monkey!  Ours was so cute and so much fun to make.

 

 

It is probably hard to tell by the pictures, but the students actually cut the arms, legs and tales out my themselves.  We let them dry just a bit before we accordion folded the arms and legs.  I just love them.  We also spent the ENTIRE DAY talking about monkeys and apes.  Of course there was a lot of monkeying around too!

 



I was really excited when I saw this next art project on PINTEREST .  I instantly fell in love with it.  I also knew my class AND their parents would really like it.  But of course, I had to add the "Mrs. Karen" twist to it. 

The original art work used the child's hand prints for the zebra and the grass.  We needed something a little more fun.  Can you guess what we used to make the grass? 

If you said a "fork", you are right!

 

Everyone really enjoyed painting with an old plastic fork, which by the way we had leftover from lunch on Monday!  (Don't worry, we washed it!)

 

On Tuesday, we painted old paper towel tubes green and after they dried, we added dots with fun little paint dabbers.  Now that was just plain messy, fun but messy!  Everyone kept trying to guess what we were going to do with them.  Finally on Thursday they all found out! 

 

Let me be the first to say that this art project DID NOT turn out like the original one I saw.  Here is it-

http://eighteen25.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/arts-crafts-tp-roll-snakes.html

But to honest, I like ours better!  They were silly fun!  We also spent the entire day talking about snakes!  (Footnote:  I do NOT like snakes!  But my class does, so I an forced to keep my feelings to myself.)

 

One of the topics that came up during our circle time was zoos versus wild.  Hmmm . . . kind of a deep subject for a group of four year olds, isn't it?  Well, that started a unique discussion about the pros and cons of being a zoo animal versus being an animal living in it's natural habitat.  WOW, my class really surprised me with their ideas and comments.  So, we did an art project that represented the animals in their natural environment.

We found some jungle stamps in our supply closet that had never been used.  It was fun to use "new" supplies.  Again, since our cutting skills are SO GOOD, I feel like I must mention that our "tree trunks" were cut by the children!  I really wasn't sure how much the children would enjoy this art project.  It really didn't say "FUN" to me.  I WAS WRONG!  Everyone loved picking out their favorite animals and stamping them in the jungle.

Friday was our "ZERO DAY"!  This year's class loves to do BIG group projects.  We covered our tables with butcher paper and laid out different circle shaped objects along with some colored pencils and markers.  Everyone had a blast tracing the circles and make ZEROES! 

 

Honestly, several of the students could have done this for HOURS!  I will say that the trick to making this successful is having a LARGE variety of traceable objects.  This was just an easy and fun way to work on our fine motor skills AND our sharing skills too!

Thank you for visiting with us.  I hope you can use some of these ideas for your classroom or just to do with your own children.  Next week we will be talking about the OCEAN!  I hope you drop back by and see what we have done!

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

 

First, we wrote the word HORSE.

Then we cut some strips of black paper.

OH BOY, it is time to glue it all together!

I LOVE THEM ALL!

All in all, I must admit we had a great week!  Thanks again for visiting with us and I hope you will stop by again soon!







"L" Week is Lovely!

When I think of all the different activities we do, I am pretty sure that "L" week is one of my favorites!  I know I say that a lot, but we always seem to have so much fun.  Let me show you some of the highlights of our week . . .

Our friend, Larry the Leaping Lizard, was a huge hit!  Besides being fun to put together, we used our fingerprints to make the little purple dots on his body.  The best part was getting to leap like a lizard all day long.

Another fun surprise for the week was our lollipops!  There are just too many "L's" in lollipops, so we had to make very large lollipops.  We started with a large round circle and added some paint.  Next, we cover the paint with some clear plastic wrap.  Now, here comes the fun part . . . squishing it!

As you can tell, there is no wrong way to squish paint!  

Some like to use one finger, 

while others enjoy squishing and slapping the paper.

After they dried we wrapped them in clear plastic wrap and added a stick!!!  

Everyone also went home with a special, sweet treat too - lollipops, of course!

 Cutting with scissors is always fun!  This week we practiced our scissor skills by making a lion!  First, we cut his mane.

Then we added some cute little eyes, a couple of ears, a nose and a mouth.

Isn't he adorable???  Of course, there was a lot of rooooaaarrring all day long.

Lots and lots of tissue paper helped make our next "L" project extra fun!  Everyone picked out their favorite color tissue paper and laid them on some very sticky clear contact paper.

Then we covered it with more contact paper.  

Now, let the fun begin!  Everyone was asked to bring a flashlight to school so we turned off the lights and ahhhhhhh . . . .

Our room came alive!  Everything looked so different with only our flashlights on.  No one wanted the lights to come back on so we laid on our backs and used our flashlights to make different shapes and letters on the ceiling.  We even tried reading a book -

Remember the tissue paper we stuck onto the contact paper???  Well, we borrowed my friend, Mrs. Tiffany's light box and ahhhhhhhh (again!)! -

 Now, see why I love "L" week?  Thanks for visiting with us, I hope you come back again soon!