This morning we started with our usual free play time. The children enjoyed reading books and playing with the pirate ship during free play.
For group time today we practiced adding and subtracting the color cubes and also practiced counting by two's. Then the children wanted to play "Marching around the alphabet" so we played that for a few rounds before sitting down to do a number project. We first practiced counting and then showing the number of fingers for each number up to 5. Then I wrote the numbers 0-5 on a piece of paper and the children chose the appropriate number of stickers to put in each space from zero to five. This was a little advanced for Milan and Ronan so I wrote the first letter of each of their names on a piece of paper and they placed stickers all along the lines of the letter. Milan and Ronan really liked doing this!
Today had some time in the morning to play outside. The children have been playing a pine cone toss game outside for the last couple of days. Ryan made a circle with colored water in the snow and the children try to throw their pine cone into the circle. Annie loves this game! The children also love playing with the shovels and swinging on the tire swing.
Our lunch menu was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grapes, peas, an oreo cookie and milk. After washing hands the children sat at their place for lunch and found that there were butter knives next to their plates. They were thrilled to find out that they would be making their own sandwich! They carefully spread the jelly and peanut butter and then closed the sandwich. When everyone had their sandwich prepared we held hands and sang our lunch time blessing and ate.
After lunch we had our Great Artist Lesson (we try to save our great artist projects until Arhan is here after kindergarten because he loves them so much!).
This week the artist that we studied was Joseph Stella (1880-1946). Joseph Stella was born in Italy but grew up in the United States. He was well known for his line art and mixed media. We learned that "mixed media" means any combination of art materials such as crayons, paint, chalk, pencils, etc. Many artists only use one type of material so it was interesting for the children to study Joseph Stella's work and practice mixing different media all in one piece of art work.
We used crayons, black pen, colored chalk, dot paints and stickers to fill in each section of our paper, making a beautiful mixed media piece of work!
When we finished our art work everybody brushed their teeth and got out their nap mats and blankets. I lit the candles and we sang our story time song and read a chapter of Junie B. Jones. I held up the name cards again as a dismissal of story time, when the children saw their own name they went to lay down on their mat. Then we said our nap time poem and laid down for a rest.