Merry Christmas

Blessings to all of you for a very Merry Christmas!  We hope it is your best Christmas ever!

Block Play

Block play takes on many forms, but it's always exciting to see vertical creations.  Charlotte built the two identical structures and told us they were Mary and Joseph.

More Than Just Decorating

At Christmastime we have a little tree in our classroom that the children can decorate and undecorate as often as they'd like.  We typically have a few ornament making projects to offer over a few weeks, but the children are welcome to make their own ornaments at any time.
Besides being festive, there are solid reasons for children to make their own ornaments.  They have chances to express their creativity and fine tune their motor skills. 

Stringing beads is a developmental milestone, but let's face it, putting teeny beads on flimsy string is hard!  We use pipecleaners rather than string for beading.  It stays firm and then bends to any shape. 

We gave the children a variety of old Christmas greeting cards and some scissors and let them cut out images to make ornaments.  There are many levels of scissor skill development, but cutting out an image is one of the toughest. Some Bunnies can do it and others are still snipping.  No matter.  The opportunity and practice is what is important.

Christmas Math

The Bunnies had a great time with this game!  They had a large die with the typical dot patterns from 1 to 6.  They rolled the die and put the same number of pompom ornaments on the tree as was shown on the die.  Once the tree was full, they rolled the die and removed the number of ornaments indicated on the die. 

Simple and FUN and packed with math skills: one to one correspondence, pattern recognition, sequencing, concept of number, addition, subtraction.

Advent

Advent is a very exciting time.  It's the beginning of the liturgical year in the church and it's the time we can prepare ourselves for the coming of Jesus.  At school we spend time talking about angels - who they are and what they do.

In the months surrounding the birth of baby Jesus, angels visited Mary, Joseph and shepherds.  These people had good reason to be anxious, unsettled and impatient, and in each instance the angels delivered calmness, reassurance and a glimpse of heaven.  Angels are messengers from God! 

Keep your eyes open for messengers from God.  They appear in very unexpected places.

Making Tracks

You must see this!

Yes, the children are darling, but what's really cool here is the train track.  You can't quite see all of it, but it is an intricate layout with tracks running under bridges, several loops and it is completely closed in all aspects.  That means with only a teensy bit of help toward the end, these children and a few others built this elaborate track that has no beginning and no end and used EVERY piece of track we have in the room.  WOW!  This was one of those days when it hurt our hearts to put the toys away.  We wanted to leave this out forever!

Potential future careers: urban planning and engineering

Stone Soup

Every year right around Thanksgiving we read the story Stone Soup and make our own soup.



 This is our favorite version!



Stone Soup is an amazing story that has stood the test of time.  There are many versions of Stone Soup, but the lesson remains the same: sharing what we have makes us feel happy.

I absolutely adore Jon Muth's version because his art is spectacular.  The delicate Asian landscapes offer an airy and gentle path to understanding the story.

To reinforce the lesson of the story, the Bunny Rabbit children became chefs.  Each child brought an ingredient from home to contribute to the soup.  

It didn't take long before the soup started to smell delicious.

Oh, yes, we put a stone in the soup.  It's the main ingredient after all!  No worries, parents, we scrubbed it with soap before we put it in the pot.


We took the heavy pot to the kitchen to cook while we played.  We came in from the playground a bit early so we could eat our soup.  Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs. Magee were super proud of the Bunnies because everyone tasted the soup and only two children said they didn't like it.

Most kids gobbled it up and asked for more!