The Dr. is in!

Saturday, March 2nd is Dr. Seuss Day so we got ready for it this week learning about about the man who wrote all the books we have loved for years!  We talked about some of the books the children recognize as well as some of the famous characters.

We talked about The Lorax and how he spoke 'for the trees'.  We made a lot of truffula trees in many forms with paper and made puffy science experiments with puffy slime too.

Most of the week we would read a book then do a variety of activities based on that book or its characters.

For example, when we read Green Eggs and Ham we 'cooked' green baking soda eggs and 'melted' them down.

This week we grew our own truffula forrest throughout the room.  Sometimes we drew them, sometimes we added tissue paper, sometimes we made them out of colored coffee filters in order to fill the room!  It is beautiful!

We built truffula trees from The Lorax out of blocks and then 'chopped' them down and built them back up again and when we read The Cat in the Hat we tried to balance lots of items from our kitchen area just like the cat does in the book.  We had a lot of silly fun with both of these areas as we rotated through these stations.

After reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish we did a science experiment about oil and water by dropping colored water into vegetable oil to watch the droplets float around.  We learned that oil and water don't mix and worked to find out what happened when we mixed all of the water and all of the oil together.

To work on our spelling this week we patterned red and white stripes in order of the letters of our names to make tall hats just like the Cat in the Hat's hat.

We worked on our pincher grasp this week as we ripped tissue paper to place it on two fish to match the books we were reading in class. 

We enjoyed watching popcorn pop after reading Hop on Pop and then did other fun popping activities as well as we made popping sounds with rhythm sticks and popped bubble wrap by jumping on bubble wrap hop scotches. 

After focusing on making more truffula trees for the classroom we did some red fish, blue fish math by having the children read a number on a red fish and then find the blue fish that matched that number with an amount of dots on it and glue them near each other in a fish bowl.  

We identified Thing One and Thing Two and made little creatures out of our hand prints while mixing some colors together to learn red and blue make purple.  My favorite part of this activity was when we hung them all up together in the classroom.  The variety of artwork on the same project is fabulous!  We love to see the creativity! 

After we cleaned up all our messy hands from making Thing One and Thing Two we worked on some STEM towers seeing all the ways it is possible to build the tallest tower possible.  The children worked together to see how to piece the small red and white cups together to create the highest tower possible. 

We built fish bowls with rainbow goldfish crackers by reading numbers written on the tops of the bowls and glued down that amount of fish to the bowl to reinforce the math from earlier in the week.

We finished out the week bouncing balls into cups to perform tricks like the crazy tricksters in so many of Dr. Seuss' books.  As we finished the games we looked back on all the great books we read this week and all the fun times we had with this week.  I hope you have some of these amazing books at home and can take some time this week and enjoy them with your children.   

What's Coming Up?
This coming week we are going to be talking about the arts.  We will be working with and visiting various events in the school that pertain to all the forms of the arts that exist.  

Don't forget that preschool registration will be coming in the next few weeks.  I will always give you a heads up here in the blog but please be sure to keep an eye on this section of the blog each week.  As a current preschool parent I have all physical and immunization records as well as birth certificates on file, however if there is a new child to our program I will need these documents with the registration forms when we begin the process.  Get those documents ready to go as we will be beginning this process soon!

Save the dates for the PHS Choir concert Friday, March 8th and the PHS Band concert on Tuesday, March 12th.  Family fun!