Farm and Apples

Welcome back to the classroom!

We spent two great weeks singing and reading about, 

playing with and talking about farm animals. 

We started the first week with

Old MacDonald Had A Farm.

 After hearing the story, we took the flannelboard pieces to the books center.

 We did a math center to work on 1:1 correspondence.

The kids had to give each chicken just one kernel of corn,

and each pig just one apple.

Scarlett counting her corn.

 Parker "feeding" the chickens.

 Mitchell giving the chickens some corn.

 Kaleb feeding the pigs.

 Nolan's pigs like apples.

 We also painted some cute little farm animals.

 For cooking that week, we made homemade butter. 

you can find the recipe here.

It's super simple, and tasted soooo good!

 In the background is one of our speech therapists, Michele Newman.

She joins us for cooking sometimes, to work on language in a more natural environment.

 Wow! Hunter is amazed!

 Spreading the butter on bread and saltines…yummy!

 The second week, we read about a character named Mrs. Wishy Washy.

She fusses at some farm animals for getting dirty, 

and gives them a bath, saying "wishy washy, wishy washy!" 

You can watch and listen to a reading of Mrs. Wishy Washy here.

 For our second week of farming, we cooked scrambled eggs on cooking Thursday!

Cooking is a great activity for social, fine motor, and language skill development.

 Last week we began apple exploration week.

At a math center, we sorted and counted apples: red/green, stem/no stem.

 We also had an apple sensory bin.

The kids could scoop the beans, count and move the apples with tongs, 

and polish the apples with a tissue.

 We painted apples red and yellow with our dot sponge painters.

 We also read Dr. Seuss's Ten Apples Up On Top.

Then we put 10 apples "up on top" of ourselves.

 Finally we had an apple tasting at the end of apples week.

Mrs. Headden helped everyone with using her special machine: 

it peels, cores, and slices apples with just the turn of a crank!

 Look at the cool apple spiral!

Finally we ate them, and they were so good! 

 On Thursdays, one of our centers is a game center, 

and for a few weeks we played Scatterpiller Scramble.

 We work on recognizing letters and letter sounds.

We practice forming and building letters, as well as writing them.

These were letters made using letter pieces: big lines and little lines.

 This was a math center activity to work on counting and 1:1 correspondence.

Roll the dice, stamp that number of cows.

 We also have done several activities, both math and literacy, in the past weeks, 

to learn about the concepts of same and different.

In this activity, the kids pressed an object into their dough to make an impression.

I had the same objects and had to match the correct one to each of their impressions, 

declaring it the "same".

 At a literacy center, we played letter bingo.

Some kids work on recognizing letters, and some work on matching them.

 Abby and Scarlett enjoy playing in housekeeping together.

 Kaleb has been watching someone cook!

Notice the appropriate use of the oven mitt…I love it!

Ben enjoyed building with legos.

 This was another same/different activity. That is such an abstract concept, 

yet it's so important for building math and literacy skills.

In this game, I hid several matching pairs of items under the cups.

The kids would pick two, and state whether 

the items were the same(matching) or different (not matching).

 Another games center day…

This time we played Pirate Pop-Up.

Playing games is a great opportunity to practice

attending skills, social language, turn taking, sharing, etc.

Thanks for visiting our classroom!

We'll see you next time!