February Fun!

February is always such a fun time with the anticipation of our Valentine's Day card swap and the winter break. We also learned about transportation, so we began by designing our new "Auto Body Shop" in dramatic play. Everyone was excited to help paint the car...

And then fix it by tinkering with parts, wheels, head lights, tail lights, oil, gas, windshield fluid,etc. They had clipboards with recording sheets to keep track of their work.....

This center was a lot of fun!

We also had a blast decorating our special Valentine's Day bags and delivering each card to our friends' bags!

And we ended the month by reading some Dr. Seuss books in honor of his birthday. We are learning about rhyming and the texts are perfect! After reading The Foot Book we did a science experiment called "fizzy feet" where we saw the effects that baking soda and vinegar have on creatures with different numbers of feet...

They especially liked the bubbling, fizzing and left over footprints! We then counted all our own feet at circle and found that we had 30 in all!

Winter

Winter is the perfect time to talk about the cold and all the fun we can have in the snow! One of the favorite activities is always making a snowman and although we have been unable to make one yet on our playground, we made some name snowmen for our class bulletin board...

We practiced counting with snowballs and mittens in our new math center...

Winter is also a perfect time to explore the great literature of Jan Brett and her books about winter animals. Her stories have predictable text and picture clues that guide children in learning to make story predictions on their own. We read The Mitten and acted out the story sequence, pretending that we were different animals in the story!

We also learned about hibernation and what animals do in the winter months,

and had our own "bear hunt" obstacle course!

Learning about the science of melting has been lots of fun! We did an experiment to see if ice would melt quicker with or without the addition of salt. The children all made predictions before we began and watched to see whether or not they were correct. The colored water just made it a lot more fun!

And our new dramatic play center for our theme of polar animals is an ice fishing center, featuring three different sizes of fish to catch, sort and record, upper and lower case letter match while feeding the seals and counting fish to feed the penguins. 

It has been a big hit this month!