We had a great week making a holiday gift for moms and dads, drinking hot chocolate and listening to the "Polar Express" and "Merry Christmas, Big Hungry Bear" in our pajamas and enjoying seasonal Practical Life activities.

Our Friday students enjoyed listening to some Christmas carols from a local recorder group and put the final touches on their paper mache dragons.

Thank you families, for all your help with the Winter Celebration Event. We appreciate all the goodies, picture taking and help cleaning up. The children were wonderful!

Happy Holidays!

This week we continued reading snow and winter books. We enjoyed, "Snow", "Winter is the Warmest Season", "Snow Sounds" and Eric Carle's "Dream Snow." Besides reading about it, the children also had a great time playing outside in the snow! Much fun was had on the sleds. We also created beautiful snowflake art using black paper, white paint and a doily:



On Wednesday, the children made holiday cards for the residents of Country Village Nursing Home. We reproduced them on a color copier and will send them over this week for the residents to enjoy.

We are working on using kind words with others and thinking about how we can make other people feel good by the things we say and do. We read, "Have You Filled a Bucket Today?" which is a great book that visually conveys the message of love and kindness for young childrren. The story says that everybody has an invisible bucket that needs to be filled up, but we need other people to fill our buckets by saying and doing kind things. When our bucket is full, we feel happy. You can also be a bucket dipper, if you use unkind words or actions and that makes others feel sad.

After we read the story we decorated our own paper buckets and thought of how we could be bucket fillers. The children were asked to finish the sentence, "I am a bucket filler when...." The responses were really sweet and thoughtful.



Our Friday students have begun to paint their dragons


Experimenting with hand bells


Math fun


An extension using the Cylinders and Brown Stairs

Reminders:

Thursday, December 16th is pajama day!

Friday, December 17th Winter Celebration Event
Lancaster Congregational Church @ 5 pm (please have children arrive between 4:30-4:45)

No School: December 21st-January 3rd
Happy Holidays!

This week we enjoyed some stories about winter and snow. We read, "The Mitten", "The Three Snow Bears" (which is very similar to "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", except it features an Inuit child and three polar bears), and 'The Snow Child' which is a Russian folk-tale about a couple who makes a snow child and she magically comes to life. We are also doing a great job practicing our songs and poems for our Winter Celebration Event.

We've also been busy...

Using our seasonal threading cards and mitten/snowball numbers and counters

Working on our yoga poses

Playing the Bank Game

Washing windows

Doing puzzles

Painting snowflakes

On Friday we worked on a handwriting exercise, experimented with some hand bells, checked out the gingerbread houses at the library and began (again) our paper mache dragons!

Our Friday group has been reading, "Elmer and the Dragon" during circle and we've been working on creating our own paper mache dragons. With our first attempt we tried some paper pulp and water solution, but it didn't work out very well so we went back to the tried and true newspapers dipped in flour and water. Very messy, but a lot of fun! The children are eager to add wings, tails and eyes and paint them next week.

Stone Soup Pictures

A big thank you to all our helpers! We had a great morning reciting our poem, reading a couple of our Stone Soup books and sharing delicious food!