What an awesome, productive first day back from winter break! This morning, our sensory bucket was filled with freezing cold ice! What a great way to kick off the start of a new season, year, and month.
Just to get it out of the way, we began the morning by allowing everyone a chance to talk about their new gifts and big adventures from the break. There was so much chatter and excitement as they told us about their experiences.
Next, we noticed a new circletime bulletin board that gives us much more space for the all-important calendar, friend's names, information about our theme and a new space for sounds. We noted that it's a new month, year, day of the week, date, and season! We officially kicked off the Lindamood LiPS program, learning to feel if sounds are noisy (voiced) or quiet (voiceless). The voicing can be felt by holding a hand on the throat, over the voice box. Noisy sounds have a vibration. Using houses and a street as visuals, we met the families Lip Poppers (b,p) and Throat Scrappers (k, g). We can't wait to have more families move onto our street!
We used small pictures with words to begin a 'Circle Map' of this month's theme: winter. These vocabulary words included: snow, cold, ice, snowstorm, snowflake, scarf, sweater, frozen, icicle, gloves, mittens, jacket, flu, and sneeze. We will continue to add other vocabulary words as the theme progresses.
Today's story was The Mitten by Jan Brett. In this adorable story, Niki looses his white mitten and can't find it against the snow. One by one, a mole, mouse, bear, badger, hedgehog, rabbit, and a fox wiggle into the mitten to get warm. When the bear sneezes, all the animals fly out and Niki finds his mitten. The children eagerly predicted many events of the story. Later, we sang a song with each of the animals. We will continue to use this text the rest of the week since there are so many fun activities related to mittens.
We also used the many mittens that you sent in (thanks!) for Mitten Math. We used a variety of non-standard units of measurement (blocks, counting bears, and pennies, as well as a ruler to measure each mitten. Today we did the activity as a group; tomorrow each child will do it independently and record the results.
During art we used ice cubes, combined with paint, to make beautiful (abstract) scenes. It was cold!
It was a GREAT first day back! Tomorrow we will read The Jacket I Wear in the Snow and 'sew' a mitten.
