Robertson Family

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Thursday

Our cute Christmas wreaths....

Our ABC Party! It was fun we watched our Letter Movie and had popcorn!!!

It was such a beautiful day we couldn't stand to stay inside too much longer, after lunch we headed out. The sun was out and it felt so good!! Music time can wait :)

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

We made these really great Christmas presents for all you moms and dads...they were so cute cute and I just KNEW you were all going to l-o-v-e LOVE them!! However you will no longer be getting them :( I woke up the next morning almost in tears to find this :

I was heart broken. This was a recipe I found online and they lady went on and on about how easy this dough was to make and to use and how pretty it turned out when it dried...well she left out the part that it would crack horribly!! So plan B is in the working!! Nope it wont be as sweet as these adorable hand prints but it will be cute...I hope...that is if I could just think of plan B ;)!
I finished fall evaluations this week, so I will have a little write up for each of you in the new year!!

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Thursday

Another fun game I found online is this Build My Tree game. The child rolls the dice telling my the number they got. Sometimes we have to count out the dots and sometimes they knew by looking really quick. Then I tell them what the number says to do...for example add an ornament, give your tree a steam...

Here's my cute little model showing off our beautiful tree!

I laminated my tree and ornaments with a magnetic roll and found these great cookie sheets at Wallmart for I think .89, can't beat that!
Today also started fall evaluations. I will have a little report card for each of you by the time we come back from Winter Break. So far I have seen some positive results!!
The other thing we are looking forward to is our ABC party!! We are going to be celebrating that we have already made it half way through our Alphabet! Which I have a hard time believing...didn't school JUST start!?!? How did we get to M already? We will be watching one of my all time favorite movies (in the educational department anyway), Leap Frog's, Letter Factory! It's about 30 minutes, so we will be watching it while we eat our lunch, should make lunch time fun.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Tuesday

Not yet December but I couldn't wait to get out the fun December games! I found this fun Snowman Bingo. The rules are, you draw a card which has a number from 0-3 on it, and you get that many snowballs and add them to your game piece.
To make your own game go to Making Learning Fun! (It can be adapted for older kids too, they have addition and subtraction cards you can print too!!)

Our new sensory table is wrapping paper. I told the kids they better learn to wrap presents, it's almost Christmas!! I gave everyone boxes and sheets of wrapping paper...really the skill I'm trying to enforce is cutting. The more they are exposed to cutting the less awkward it becomes! I'm hoping through these next few weeks of school before break they will become more comfortable with cutting!

A special thanks to Tina Lyman for donating wrapping paper for our project :)! She is too kind!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Tuesday

Tuesday...hum what did we do on Tuesday, this is how bad my memory is if I don't have pictures of it it's difficult to remember...sometimes I feel like preschool is such a whirlwind, it comes and goes so fast!! I did take pictures, however my phone malfunctioned and I lost all my pictures.
Well lucky for you I have a backup brain...it's called a lesson plan. And according to it, we read Thanksgiving stories, talked about what we were thankful for, learned the Thanksgiving story and made bracelets to help us remember the story of Thanksgiving :)!! I found the idea here, and thought is was too cute to not copy!! Here is the poem:

Thanksgiving Story Bracelet

With this bracelet you will know
The first Thanksgiving that was long, long ago.
The Pilgrims set sail from far away
On the Mayflower with tall white sails.
They sailed many days across the ocean blue.
The seas were rough, but the ship came through.
At last they spotted land so green.
They were so happy they cheered and screamed.
The first year was so hard and black.
Many died and wished that they could go back.
But the Native Americans gave them a hand
And helped them survive in the strange new land.
They decided to celebrate in a special way
And that became the first Thanksgiving day.
They prepared a feast with turkeys brown
And red cranberries that they had found.
Yellow corn that they had learned to grow
And orange pumpkin pies, don’t you know!
But before they ate the turkey and dressing,
They all held hands for a thankful blessing.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Thursday

We finished up our sorting with our sorting bean projects. I thought the kids did so well sorting all their beans. I had them devide their paper in quarters and then had them sort the beans into the four corners!

We also have been continuing our music unit. With our scarves we have been talking about how music makes us feel. Sometimes when it goes fast it makes us want to jump up and down or when it's slow it makes us feel calm. We have been using our scarves to move to the rhythm of the music. I'll have to try and snap some pictures next time...it's just so exciting it's hard to pause for a picture sometimes!!

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Where Pintrest Collides...

I saw a fun idea on Pintrest about making colored rice (<-got there for recipe) for a sensory table...HAD to do! Well as it was all pretty colored and sitting on my craft table I saw yet another idea on Pintrest and it was to make clear bean bags. However the things she had in hers weren't as brightly colored as my flashy rice!! And then I realized I had 5 tubs of this beautifully colored rice and I couldn't resist!! So out came 10 clear bean bags filled with colored rice! I wasn't really sure what I was going to use them for but when I was finished I shook them to mix up the rice and they made the prettiest sound. So at music time I pulled them out and the kids had a blast.

Notice I mixed the colors :)...I started off doing all blue and all green...then those little voices popped into my head, "I want green, I want pink...I didn't want purple..." So yes I made them multi colored! Smart...I know!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Tuesday

Is this not the cutest little bunch of pilgrims you have ever seen!?! Indeed cute with their adorable little hats but next time I want preschool craft ideas I wont turn to Martha Stewart...she is crafty indeed, but preschool friendly? Not so much!

So my disclaimer is that: the kids did not do this craft, this was a 99% (The boys glued on their gold buckle) Miss Kelli craft...my least favorite kind. Not that I mind the work, but I don't like kid crafts that teachers do. Kaylee's preschool teacher did about (I'm just guessing here) 90% of the work on their crafts and it drove me crazy! She was just too much of a perfectionist to let them be creative! Check out turkey pics in earlier post to prove that I don't have this issue...I love the upside down feet and the 2 different sized eyes and upside down mouths and wings that are all scallywampus! Love, love, love it!! Anyway, I'm digressing here...I just wanted to make it clear that I'm sorry their craft was not much of a craft as much as it was just a prop for the day.

We have been talking about Thanksgiving and being thankful all month we have been talking about the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and Indians!

Our sorting continues...this week we did sorting beans. They were given a bowl of mixed beans with some small cups and then they had to sort them....

I love this picture. I asked why is this one bean all by itself? It was a red kidney bean I thought why didn't he put it with the rest of the kidney beans? Well if you look really closely at it it has a little crackly/spotted design on it...so he says, "Well it was the only one like that, it has lines on it." I was impressed he noticed the little differences in the beans!!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Thursday

So not my favorite recipe for finger paint...I made one before that looked really pretty and turned out great on paper. This one, well, didn't look to hot to start with and looked even worse on paper. Oh well, you win some, you loose some. The kids had fun I guess that's all the really matters in my book. But don't be surprised if you see a few more finger painting projects until I find the right one! Or if you have a favorite one, feel free to post it in the comments. I'm always open to new recipes! I can't even remember where this one was from because I deleted the link soon after I made it and was unimpressed!

Anyway, Thursday was another fun filled day. We are building our song library and the kids are really picking up on the songs we are learning. Five Little Ducks I think is an all time favorite! And our alphabet song is still growing...

the A says aaa, the A says aaa, every letter makes a sound the A says aaa...the B says...you get the idea ;)! We made it through to I this week and still going strong!! It wouldn't be a bad idea to sing this with them at home and then ask them, "what starts with bu, bu, bu, B?" They are doing really well at coming up with words with their sounds. You'll be impressed...give it a try!

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Tuesday

Some more great things we borrowed were these shape sorting peg boards, they are fun to make designs out of and the kids really had fun with them. The above picture is Rapunzel's tower and a smiley face! Cute huh?!?!
I think it's safe to say though the new favorite toy of the month are these great magnetic things...they can be so creative with them and build, make patterns, sort and just have fun. They have been a real crowd pleaser!!!

These though should be the ultimate crowd pleaser...how cute are their turkeys?!?! We needed a triangle project for this week and I had found these adorable turkeys on Pintrest but I didn't do the feather pattern, we just did triangles instead.

When passing out eyes someone decided it would be funny to have one little eye and one big...LOVE IT!!

I hope you parents all enjoyed our popcorn pictures. This was a fun day for the kids...messy but so worth it! I think these are too cute. Thank you Little Wonders day for the cute idea!!

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Thursday

We had, or at least I had a fun day today! We talked about the process of corn. We looked at pictures of ears of corn and talked about how yummy it is, then how corn can be dried. And then I asked them what we do with it once it's dried, and I asked them what they thought was going to happen if we heated up the corn. Lucky for me these days, air poppers are almost obsolete (yes I had to borrow this ol' timer!) so they weren't really sure. We popped the corn with the lid off so they could see if come out of the popper, it was very exciting and the kids were excited to be able to eat it. We made these adorable "corn on the cob" pictures that I found on Little Wonders' Days, they will get to bring them home on Tuesday...they were still a little too gooy to bring home!
Our other focus this month besides sorting, is rhythm. I had a very generous, very kind friend from church, Cheryl Forsburg, donate some things to me, these fun scarves with a CD of fun scarf activities was one of them! Today we talked about how some music makes us want to move fast and some makes us want to move slow...These scarves made for a fun music time today!!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Tuesday

I love the first of the month...it just always feels like a fresh new start!
This month we started talking about sorting. Sorting by color, sorting by type or in some cases they sorted by BOTH!!! I was impressed!! Soon we will learn to sort by size. The kids had fun with one of our new sensory tables...it's a sorting by color box.

just ignore the purple pig...we aren't sure why he was in a transportation box! :)

We have another sensory box...things that are soft (and toilet paper rolls, they are always a good addition!). We have sponges, soft blocks, pom poms, and soft fabric.I wasn't sure if this would be a fun one, bur kids are so creative...they made caterpillars, beds for their caterpillars, towers, they tried to see how many things they could stuff in a tube...they had fun!

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Thursday

Before Thursday's Halloween Party began we really did so some work :)! It was our last day of patterns and I think everybody has got that down. It was also our last day of all our Halloween books. The kids really had fun with our, Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything and Are You MY Mummy? Both very cute and fun books!