***Spoiler! Parents Christmas gifts below! ***
 
The past couple weeks everyone has been busy, busy, busy! The kids have been making gifts for their parents and ornaments/decorations to take home! They made a reindeer a footprint craft and a sewn and decorated felt stocking ornament. It's amazing what young ones can do when given the chance. They all did so great!
 
Here are our activities from the past two weeks:
 
-Played a Christmas memory match game
-Made Christmas picture patterns
-Sorted wooden Christmas pieces
-Together they counted each group of wooden Christmas pieces and identified the corresponding number.
-Figured out which shapes the wooden Christmas pieces matching most.
-Painted wooden ornaments
-Built Christmas tree names. Some practiced writing the letters on their own and some traced.
-Went on a scavenger hunt for red and green objects.
-Learned how to knead while making our salt dough ornaments.
-Decorated foam candy canes.
-Made a Christmas tree ornament out of popsicle sticks, buttons and pom poms.
-We made Gingerbread cookies!
-Made cookie cutter paintings.
-Made icy winter paintings using Epsom salts on the top.
 
We also worked our way through through the letters W- Z.
 
I hope everyone had a safe and happy Christmas!

We spent our week learning about some of the traditions of Hanukkah. We learned about how the oil lamp’s oil lasted for eight days, even though it was only had enough oil for one day, hence the importance of the number eight. There are eight days of Hanukkah, a candle is lit for each day on the Menorah, and small gifts are given each of the eight days. We learned Santa does not come for Jewish boys and girls because they do not celebrate Christmas and that’s okay; others may believe in different things than we do. The kids felt good about this because they figured that as long as the Jewish boys and girls still received gifts from their parents then that was good. It was very sweet listening to them talk about how they didn’t want Jewish boys and girls to be left out of the gift giving.
 
We learned that Jewish kids play the Dreidel game to win chocolates. The kids really enjoyed this! They learned how to play the Dreidel game using paper coins and then after they learned the game, they are playing with real chocolate coins. The kids also decorated paper Dreidels with little snowflakes, BINGO dabbers and glitter glue. This is great for working out those finger, hand and arm muscles!
 
The kids made tape resist Star of David paintings after learning that Hanukkah colours are blue and white/silver and used scrap paper rectangles to make menorahs. They also practiced their AB colour patterns using pretend Menorah candles.
 
Our letters this week were N and V.
 
Unfortunately, on the last day of our visits the Story Book Truck was unable to come. When talking about this disappointment we decided that the positive take from this is that we get to keep the library books for a little while longer!

This week was all about penguins. We learned where they live geographically, what they eat, and the characteristics of a variety of them. We learned that Daddy penguins take care of the eggs while the mommy penguin goes out hunting for food to bring back. Some of their faces, when they learned how penguins feed their babies, was hilarious! With this in mind, that kids made play dough penguin eggs that represented the number the paper penguin was holding.
 
Some of our Morning Meeting activities this week included; giving penguins toques that matched each penguins scarf, matching penguin shapes, matching uppercase letter penguins, and matching lowercase and uppercase letters. The younger kids had the letters that had uppercase and lowercase letters that resembled each other, while the big kids had the remaining ones.
 
The kids also did mirrored penguin paintings and practiced cutting skills when making a paper penguin.
 
Our letters this week were A and M. Some “at” words made it into our learning this week as well, because we heard a few of them in one of our songs. The kids did a great job building these letters using big lines and little lines. They are now starting to remember the terminology we use when describing how to build a letter. This will help greatly when we focus more on writing in the new year.
 
Even though we were lacking heat, our Storybook Truck visit went well again this week. Only one more Story Book Truck Thursday left! The kids sure do love getting new books each week, especially when they get to pick them out.
 
We also made guacamole and baked a cake for a very special 5th birthday! I over gauged the amount of cake batter that went into the pan so we were not able to eat the cake on the day of the birthday celebration, so we had candles in jumbo marshmallows and sang Happy Birthday that way. I had apologized to the kids and with a smile on their faces, a couple of them told me that that was okay. How sweet are they!