Christmas Memories Made in the Classroom!

Our last week in the classroom was very busy! We finished our presents for our parents, made a few ornaments for our tree, and performed our Christmas program for our parents.  We ended the week with our Polar Express Day! It was a fun and magical time in our class!

The children went home with lots of beautiful ornaments for the tree! We made sprinkled pine cone ornaments, applesauce ornaments, and Popsicle Christmas tree ornaments.

For the parents we made these adorable snowmen out of plant pots turned upside down and painted!

Singing Rudolph in our Christmas play!



Singing Away in a Manger!



We all wear our pjs and read the book
and watch the movie
while enjoying hot coco!

Polar Express Day is always a great way
to end our Christmas unit in the classroom!

It's Beginning to Look at Lot Like Christmas...

It is sweet in our classroom this week! We have made all types of Christmas candy in our classroom! From Peppermints to Gum Drops it has been fun to eat and create with the students!

Our Sight word Christmas Tree has been great for the students! This week they are making Christmas Cards for local veterans and their families!

 

The North pole is a great addition to Dramatic Play! The students are busy cooking up some delicious treats!



This week we had two of our moms help us make gingerbread houses for each of our students!

We have a mitten tree in class that is decorated with donations from our students to give to children who are less fortunate...teaching the true meaning of giving!

Every day in December is Magical for our students!

Festival of Trees

Every year our class enters the 'Festival of Trees' at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa.  This year instead of doing a gingerbread house we decided to create our first tree!  We decided to use the childrens hands and cut them out of salt dough; and then paint them green to create our tree.  We then glittered the alaphabet and added a litttle snow.  The title of our tree was "He has the whole world in his hands." At the top of our tree are the hands holding the earth!

The best part about entering the exhibit is taking a field trip to see our entry! After touring the museum we take the children to see Santa at Utica Square and give Santa our letters we have written him in class.  This is always a fun and festive field trip!

Celebrating Thanksgiving in the Classroom!

Thanksgiving is one of our favorite holidays to celebrate in the classroom! Our five year olds learn about the true meaning of Thanksgiving.  They create Native American costumes to wear and learn poems and songs to present to their parents.  We create place mats, tee-pees, pine cone turkeys, and turkey callers throughout the unit to use on their Thanksgiving Day table.  But most of all we learn what we are truly thankful for...our family, friends, and God!

Writing Board

Dramatic Play

Our Thankful Board



Our Thanksgiving Program



Adorable Cookies brought by one of our sweet moms!



 

Counting to 50 in Excel!

Everyday in our class we count the number of days we have been in school.  This helps us teach the children to count by 1s, 2s, 10s, and 100s.  This week we hit the 50th day of school! In celebration our class dressed in true 50s attire with slick back hair, pink ladies, poodle skirts, and leather jackets.  Milkshakes were served for snack, and our wonderful parents brought in sonic hamburgers for lunch.  We had an official sock hop and made "records" on a real record player for art.  This is always a favorite day in our class!

Dinosaur Romp

This week in class we discovered DINOSAUR bones! Literally! We had 16 paleontologists who found dinosaur bones in our sandbox and in our sensory table.  We made dinosaur eggs (blown up balloons with glue and flour to harden, painted, and of course hatched with a dinosaur inside!), changed our names to dinosaur names, and even created our own favorite dinosaurs! This week made a big IMPRESSION on the kids!

Happy Halloween from the classroom!

We had a great Halloween week in our classroom! Mummies, spiders, bats, and pumpkins! We took a field trip to the pumpkin patch, made great arts and crafts, and of course had some yummy food!

The Leaves Are Changing...

The leaves are changing in our classroom! Our classroom tree, with the help or our crayon melt and a few cut our leaves, has begun to change!

And we added a few more things to our Fall board.  Acorns, squirrels, and a few spiders were fun for all our students to make.

Our writing center is a web of sight words!

And of course we have to include
apples in our classroom to make
fall official! We baked an apple pie,
made Carmel apples, and we did apple

weaving in art.

Fall in Excel

It is Fall in Excel! This week we are studying leaves, acorns, spiders, and...baseball!  We had our World Series celebration. The students dressed in their baseball gear, we played ball, ate peanuts and cracker jacks.  For lunch, of course, we had hot dogs!

Transportation Week in Excel!

Boats, Trains, Planes, and Cars! Stop, Go, Exit, Red, Yellow, Green...transportation week was a success in our classroom this week! We started off by making traffic light sugar cookies, always a hit with the children.  We had a transportation celebration where every child was able to bring their bike, scooter, skates, or other favorite form of transportation. The students loved listening to a real race car driver who dressed in full attire and brought pictures of his car. One of our dads brought up a motorcycle and drove it around for the students.  The children also took home their own environmental print book.  We studied all the important traffic signs and by the end of the week our class knew them all! We made boats out of juice boxes and had a sailboat race in our "little pool" out on the playground.  Transportation week was a GO for our class.

Western Week in the Preschool Classroom

This week we are calling all cowgirls and cowboys to our ranch! We are excited about learning all about the Wild West in class.  With the help of some of our amazing parents we have a hay bail, saddle, and lasso so our students can take turns riding our classroom "horse."  Cowboy hats and vest are a must.  A mom came in to make vests out of brown paper grocery sacks.  We also had a fair day in class this week to celebrate the Tulsa State Fair.  Each child brought in an exhibit and a stuffed animal for the petting zoo.  The exhibits were judged by a grandmother in class who was an official 4H judge.  Lunch that day was made by our chefs.  On the menu: Corndogs, carmel apples, cheese puffs, and lemonade of course!

Theme: Construction

Our classroom is under construction! We love this unit of study.  Our preschool room is already full of great manipulatives to make a week of construction great.  But, add in a field trip to a contstruction site, dirt, tools, hard hats, and great construction art and your students will never want to leave!