During week #11 we started to prepare for Thanksgiving with some fine motor skills practice-turkey style.  The students poked feathers into the turkey box and pinched clothespins onto the turkey by matching the colors. We also worked with the letter Tt and the number 6.

 We talked about forms of transportation and made trains in all three classes.  The 3s class glued rectangles onto the tracks to make their trains but the 4s classes had letters written on their rectangles that, if glued in order, would spell their names.  Some students even decided to add details such as smoke or passengers to their pictures.  I enjoy seeing the creativity of the children. In the big room we played a game called airport where the children pretend to be airplanes flying around the room until I say "land" and then they slow down and come in for a safe landing until we "take off" again.  We read several books about transportation and acted them out as well.  Finally we found toys in the classroom that were forms of transportation.  Even though it was a shortened week because of fog, we accomplished a lot.

 For week #10 we worked with the letter Bb.  Bb is for bears and buttons.  We read "Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons" and then the 4s classes glued buttons onto their cat and wrote how many buttons they had.

 The 3s class each got a cup full of colored blocks and they had to match each block in their cup to the colored rectangles around the room. You can see the yellow rectangle in this picture. This got them up and moving while also working on color matching.

 Both 4s classes learned a new game in the big room this week.  It's called the hibernation game. A couple of students were "hibernating bears" and the rest of the class had to tiptoe past the bears without waking them up. When I yelled "springtime," the bears woke up and tried to catch the students.

 The 4s classes also worked on cutting and gluing skills by trying to place the numbers 1-5 in order.

 We started letter centers this week in the 4s classes.  There were several hands-on activities to practice our letter of the week.  We traced letter cards, we wrote the letter, we wrote the letter in sand, and we created the letter using these new magnetic pieces.

 The students were invited to bring a bear to school and then the 3s class colored bears while their stuffed bear friends watched on. We had a busy week with bears!

 For week #9, our letter was Ee. We did a lot of counting to five this week. We counted bears, bees, cars, jumping jacks and butterflies.  We even learned this song (sung to B-I-N-G-O): Can you count to five with me? I know that you can do it. 1,2,3,4,5  1,2,3,4,5  1,2,3,4,5  I knew that you could do it. 

 Probably the best part of the week was getting down the big blocks.  There are several students who had asked me several times "when are we going to play with the big blocks?"  This week was the week.  We played with them all three days and we left them down so we can play with them again next week.  I saw a lot of animal cages being built, but also a train, a boat, and some houses.