Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Our Valentine's Day Fun 2011

Our Valentine's Day activities have been ongoing for about a week now. We managed to get more than our moneys worth using conversation hearts in various activities. We decorated hearts and used them to decorate a Valentine Tree for our door.


We have patterned, sorted, counted and played math games with conversation heart erasers.


Each child brought in a tissue box to wrap, decorate and use as a Valentine holder. We wrapped them in bulletin board paper, which was great fine motor practice.


Let the creative juices flow!



Leave it to the teacher to forget to bring a box for herself until the very last minute! I missed the sticker frenzy by waiting so long and most of the stickers were gone, so I decided to add a little paint to tie mine into our postal theme.



I have several students still struggling with writing their own name. I thought it would be good practice for the kids to write their own name on their Valentine cards. We didn't address the cards to a recipient, which made for much easier delivery.


For our gifts to the parents, we made refrigerator magnet art, using Crayola Model Magic. We cut shapes with cookie cutters and let them dry for a few days.

Crayola 57-4415 Model Magic Modeling Compound, 2-lb. Bucket, Asstd Colors, Four 8-oz. Pouches

We painted them with watercolor paints and glued magnets to the back.


We dipped our cookie cutters in pinks, reds and blues to decorate bags to wrap them in.


During nap, I ran out to pick up a few last minute party items. To occupy a few of our non-sleepers, my assistant allowed them to put some finishing touches on their gift bags. Apparently, after finishing the wrapping, they decided Ms. Tiffany needed a new hairdo for the party! (She's such a good sport, she even made sure everyone who wanted a turn had a little portion of hair to "fix"! :)


Much to our surprise, one of our dads belongs to a barbershop quartet. He and his group surprised us with a serenade. It happened so fast that by the time I realized what was happening, got the camera and got the video mode switched on, the song was almost over, but I'll include the clip here to show how good they were!





For Valentine party snacks, we had a frosted cookie and a few Cheetos Puffs, but had requested mostly healthy items, so we snacked well, but healthily.


My friend, Mia and her snack: "Look, Mrs. Ayn, I made a happy plate!"


Hope your Valentine's Day was as happy as ours! :)

Monday, February 14, 2011

Conversation Hearts in the Class



With Valentine's Day approaching, we've done several activities involving conversation hearts. Of course, we taste tested them, but there's more to do with these candies than just eating them. We started by placing one of the hearts in a container of water. We wondered what might happen after we left it for a bit.


When we returned, we made this observation chart.


We put some in a jar and estimated how many we thought we inside.


Some of our guesses were not too far off.



We estimated how many candy hearts would fit on a larger paper heart, then filled it up and counted the hearts. On another day, we graphed the hearts by color.

We will use some of the leftover hearts to use as writing prompts for our journals this week....and probably snack on a few more, too!






Sunday, February 6, 2011

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Chinese New Year 2011



We celebrated Chinese New Year this year! It's not something we usually get to spend any time on with so many other things we've got going on. Teacher Tom has written some wonderful posts about the things his classes do. (Be sure to check out: Gung Hay Fat Choy, Dragons and Fantastic Creatures, The Boy Who Painted Dragons, and New Years Dragons and Tape Off ). Truth be told, I know next to nothing about Chinese New Year. I have a Chinese American student this year and wanted to make sure we included his traditions into our classroom celebrations.

We made paper lanterns out of construction paper. This was quite an exercise in cutting and following directions. Every year's group of students does some tasks quite skillfully and some with great difficulty. This year's group just cant seem to get the hand of cutting folded paper to make multiples. We've been practicing this skill a lot lately since I know this is something they'll do quite a bit in kindergarten. I had to pull out the tape to fix a few that cut way too far, but that's okay. The purpose was the cutting practice and not a perfect lantern. We hung them around our room for decoration.



We talked a bit about dragons and how the western culture thinks of them as evil, fire breathing creatures and how the Chinese culture reveres them for power, strength and luck.

We read a few books about Chinese New Year that furthered our understanding of Gung Hay Fat Choy traditions.

My First Chinese New YearCelebrating Chinese New Year: Nick's New YearBringing in the New Year (Read to a Child!: Level 2)Chinese New Year (Rookie Read-About Holidays)

Gung Hay Fat Choy!


Love Bugs



We made Love Bugs in Pre-K! We provided a selection of paper hearts and art materials for the children to create a bug of their choosing.











We put them on our holiday themed bulletin board.



Catch the Love Bug!


Thanks for stopping by!

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