Our general theme this week is 'The Body.' We are singing and shaking 'Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dancing Bones...The toe bones connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone...'  We're talking about all the bones that make up our body, and how the brain sends messages to the muscles enabling us to move.  We have little body cutouts for collage and the children select fabric and dress their person, along with yarn hair.  After our numerous discussions about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. last week, some children are mentioning it this week (Rosa Parks and the bus incident, and using powerful words) and one child chose to make MLK as his collage person. At the easel we are doing self portraits and encouraging the children to look in the mirror and see the color of their eyes, noticing eyebrows, where their ears are in relation to their eyes, the shape of their nose, the color, style and length of their hair.  Some are displayed on our bulletin board. Talking about the senses: see, hear, touch, taste and smell, we have out a olfactory activity - pairing cotton ball infused spices (cinnamon, cloves and ginger).  We also played the mystery bag, where the children take turns putting their hand in the 'mystery bag' and feel for an object, guessing what it might be. 

 

 This week we had lots of  bananas for snack so we decided to bake mini banana muffins, which everyone helped prepare, and we've been enjoying them after lunch all week!  

 

At gym the children played wolf and sheep, and the sheep tried to run through the wolf's den and not get caught (tagged).  At yoga on Wednesday we warmed up, stretched and went through some poses from baby to child(now able to eat at the table, and growing into a teenager riding a bicycleto school... The children move through the poses as the story is told.  

 

This week we talked about bears and hibernation. We discussed Polar Bears, Black Bears, and Brown Bears. We learned new vocabulary words such as hibernation (when a bear will sleep for a long time during the winter months), and den (where a bear lives and chooses to hibernate). We also learned about where different kinds of bears live, what they like to eat, and about their babies (cubs). We learned a bear game to play at group time. All of the children pretend to bears sleeping in their den. We then go through all different kinds of weather (with the teachers making the narrative of rain, thunder and then finally snow). When winter is over and spring has arrived, the bears wake up and jump out of their den! We enjoyed several story books, including Old Bear, Little Cuband Bear Has a Story to Tell.
We have also been very interested in sign language in our classroom and have been learning different words. Some that the children have been using signs for “more”, “eat”, and we learned “bear” on Wednesday. 

On Wednesday, we also joined the other class for yoga! Please check out this weeks pictures to see some of the poses that we learned.

We have been creating bears using different shapes that we have learned, such as circle and oval. The children then painted or used colored pencils on their stenciled bears. We also made “bear prints”. 

We introduced banana cutting. All of the children are quite good at peeling their banana, slicing their banana with the child size (safe) knife, and then eating the banana at the end! They are also quite good at packing away and cleaning up so the next friend can have a turn.