Friday, January 29th recap!

What a fabulous day!  Our table choices upon arrival were retelling The Three Snow Bears with characters, or building with bristle blocks.  I ended up read The Three Snow Bears on the rug with several children.

We started circle around 9:30 and followed our usual routine.  I showed them Jan Brett’s The Mitten, we glanced through the pages to refresh our memories.  We then looked at Jim Aylesworth’s The Mitten. The children noticed the boy was wearing red mittens, not white!

We read the story, then compared and contrasted the two books.  We saw which characters were the same, which were different.  In Jan Brett’s book the mitten got really stretched out.  See if your child remembers what happened to the RED mitten! (it exploded!)

I showed them a cut out of a large mitten, asked them to brainstorm what might fit in THEIR mitten.  Predictably, they first gave me characters from the story. A bear. A rabbit. A mouse.  I started modeling really “out there” things… a large horse, Cinderella’s castle, a fire engine… The eyes began to sparkle!  Ideas started flying!

At 10:00 (just when I’d hoped!) Four children went to the “green station” with the assistant teacher. At the easel were four large paper mittens.  The children were encouraged to paint and tell  about the really large things in their mittens.

The “blue” group came to a table with me.  I gave them the penguin pictures.  I then gave them each one goldfish cracker and put it on the sun.  Then I instructed them to put the fish on the penguin’s belly, on its foot, on a cloud, then on their mouths.  Then I said, “Now put it IN your mouth!”  Several of them looked at me with an “Are you SERIOUS face?”   The grins spread!

We did the same with under and next to.  (Beside was a bit more difficult.)  Then we had three fish. We counted, insuring one to one correspondence by making them “jump.”   We ate one.  How many were left? After about 15 minutes, we switched groups.

At 10:30, the bathroom run began, followed by snack.  After snack, the children had children’s choice.  Once again, I was pleased at how they immediately began playing, and how the dynamics changed!  Great interactions!

Around  11:20, they cleaned up.  During music, we did Looby Loo slowly at first, then they asked for the CD.  The music goes at a brisk pace!  They laughed and had fun!

Since it was too cold to go out, I got out the scooters.  The children all worked together rolling up the rug, and each child got a scooter with the “You get what you get” rule, color-wise.   They scooted frontwards and backwards while sitting, and on their bellies. We finished by doing Looby Loo again on scooters!

At the end of the day, we read Mo Willems’ Leonardo the Terrible Monster.  As I mentioned at the end of class, they LOVED it, and asked me to read it again.  Every three year old sat riveted to the story!