Mary Cassatt- Child In Blue

It's great to see the bright sun this morning! Rather than our regular great artist lesson right after lunch we decided to run around and play at our playground for a little while. The children love playing outside and always find something new and exciting to discover or imagine.
This morning we worked on our listening skills. We played Sound Bingo! The older preschoolers completely understood what Bingo was about and wondered what their prize would be upon winning- the younger preschoolers didn't understand it so well but they did enjoy listening to all of the sounds and trying to guess what was making the sound.
This morning the boys spent some time playing with the kitchen toys and lining up the chairs while the girls spent some time using the "free art" materials cutting, gluing, using stickers and different colored paper. When the boys noticed how much fun the girls were having they also joined in for some free art time.
Our lunch today was macaroni and cheese, mushrooms with some ranch dressing for dipping, and blueberries. The blueberries and mushrooms were a big hit!
After our outside play time we came in and sang our story time song and read the story "Cinderella's Rat" just kind of a silly twist on the fairytale Cinderella. When the story was finished I said the sound the first letter of each child's name makes to signal them to go to their mats. Once everyone was on their mat we said our good night poem and got tucked under our blankets for a nice afternoon rest.
Since we didn't do our Great Artists project this morning we plan on doing that as we wake up. Our Great Artist this week is Mary Cassatt. She was a great Impressionist painter that grew up in America but like many artists of her time, moved to Paris to live and work as an artist. She decided to become an artist when she was very young, even though her family felt it was not a proper job for a young women. She believed in herself, studied hard, and went on to become a famous artist.
Cassatt is famous for her paintings of mothers and children. Some of her pictures are mono prints, made by painting a picture on a flat tray, then pressing paper on top of the wet paint to make a print of the image. This is the kind of art work that we plan on making using a cookie sheet, tempera paint, a stick to make the design and some white drawing paper. We plan on looking at some pictures of the different kinds of paintings that Mary Cassatt made and then reading a short story about her life.
If we have time at the end of the day we plan on doing one more listening activity- musical chairs! Everyone loves a good round of musical chairs, and it helps the children to learn how to win and loose graciously, how to share, work together, take turns, and listen.