Happy St. Patrick's Day!

After hearing two wonderful Star of the Week presentations we jumped into St. Patrick's Day this week.  We learned about leprechauns and then made beards for them using our home made puffy paint which is a mixture of glue and shaving cream and then hung these up in our room to attract a leprechaun for good luck this week.

 After adding our leprechaun art to the room we did some rainbow math with dotted clouds and rainbows to match the images together to complete the entire rainbow curve.

We learned a wonderful Irish Jig for kids this week and danced it every day this week.  The teachers and children enjoyed it so much we did it over and over again!  Here is the link for you to enjoy it as well!

Monday we learned how much leprechauns enjoy the color green and began our mission to collect as much green as we could find in the room and fill up our cauldron to the top with anything green we could find.  It was amazing to see how excited the children were to hunt down this color as they looked in every nook and cranny of our room for it all. 

 We went on Irish adventures this week using balance beams and hula hoops to walk across and hop through acting as leprechauns on great adventures.  

 Later we made rainbows by sorting colored toys by color and assembling them into rainbows, then cut out rainbow colored shapes to match them to the spot on the leprechaun's hat and then got a work out going with Leprechaun yoga moves.

 We made a pot of gold with sparkling gold paint and our hand prints with rainbow colored paint.  Some of our children painted their own hands, others painted teacher hands and others traced their hands with crayons and colored them.  Whenever given a task like this we try to have as many choices for the children to make their art their own and avoid things looking like cookie cutter art to allow for creativity even during product art.  

 By Friday our Leprechaun left us all kinds of surprises!  We were given bottles of ingredients that caused an 'Irish Volcano' that fizzed and bubbled everywhere! 

Then, we got clues to go on an adventure around the building looking for the pot of gold and treasure, we were able to find it at in the corner of the hallway near our main office.  The children all got lots of gold and green coins as well as a piece of treasure.

But then, that tricky leprechaun made a mess of our room while we were gone looking for treasure and we had to clean up our classroom with toys thrown all over the floor, tables turned over and chairs upside down.  The children worked really well with one another to put all of the items away and got our room back into shape in no time.

We worked on sorting our big and small letters in pots of gold that were made for only gold coins that had capitol or lower case letters.  Sorting letters is a helpful reading strategy that builds the skills needed to put words together later during readings.

After sorting letters into their pots on Friday we used the magic paint the leprechaun left us that fizzed when we mixed the yellow and blue paints together.  As we worked to paint shamrocks we mixed those two colored paints together to watch them blend into the color green and bubble at the same time!  

 Many thanks to our guest Irish dancer this week as she demonstrated her talent of Irish dancing and showed us pictures of her fancy dance costumes.  Once she demonstrated the dance, she taught it to some of our brave preschoolers who wanted to try their hand at Irish dance too.  It was a very special treat and we were so grateful to have her come and help us out!

What's Coming Up?

We are FULL for the 2018-2019 preschool year; thanks to everyone for getting signed up and full within 36 hours this year!

Next week we will be learning about how our gardens grow as we talk about spring and the outdoors the week before spring break.

Spring break will be from March 24th - April 1st with school resuming Monday, April 2nd.