Snow Theme (from last week)

Well, last week was our Snow theme... but I think for next year, if I'm on the Letter S at the end of March, I'll do a Spring theme.  That would correspond better to the weather, I think!!!  I only had munchkins on Monday, Thursday, and Friday this week and I was supply teaching on Tuesday and Wednesday.  A new little person has started at Precepts Academy.  I'm going to call her Honey Bee.  She is four years old, but because of complications due to an illness when she was born, she's roughly at a two year old development level.  Honey Bee was here by herself for her first day, and I think that was a good thing because it gave her a chance to get used to some of the rules here.  One of her favourite activities was matching up coloured plastic Easter Eggs and opening them to find the foam snowflake I had hidden inside.  Another activity that we did that was great for fine motor skills was Stickers!!  I peeled all the extra paper off the sheet and left just the stickers, then she peeled off the stickers and stuck them to a page.  This took quite a bit of focus. 

I cut out the circles and she helped me to arrange them from biggest to smallest to make the snowman.  

We did some Brain Gym activities to get both brain hemispheres working together.  Later, I did some research on developmental delay, and many articles said that spinning is also good for children in this regard.  Currently, Honey Bee doesn't always recognize that I am asking her a question and want to hear her answer, and she'll just repeat the question.  I'm working on having her say "My name is...." when I ask "What's your name?"  We'll get there!!

Princess came on Thursday and Friday morning, and stayed for Lunch on Thursday.  (I thought this would give us some extra activity time, but I ALWAYS forget how slow children eat!!!  Snack is never finished according to my timeline for the day!!  Ahh well, we just cut a few minutes out of playdough time, and it all evens out!!)  We read "I am Snow" and "The Snowy Day" and we worked on learning the poem Snowflakes by Leroy Jackson.  I'm also trying to teach the kids to say "A Child's Prayer for Morning" each day during our Calendar time.  It goes like this:

Now, before I run to play,
Let me not forget to pray
To God who kept me through the night
And waked me with the morning light.
Help me, Lord, to love Thee more
Than I ever loved before,
In my work and in my play
Please be with me through the day.
Amen.

This will take a couple of weeks because I don't have each child every day! 

For our snow crafts, we did some snowflake stamping, using some foam stamps I have.  Added to this, we also glued some white foam snow flakes to our page to make a snow scene, and added some paper punch out snowflakes from a scrapbook punch I have.  The scrapbook punch snowflakes was a great activity, because Princess had to use a lot of strength to punch it all the way through the paper.  Friday's craft was the traditional cutting paper snowflakes.  I folded the paper across the corner to make a square shape and drew as straight line to show where the bottom needed to be cut off and Princess cut across the line with scissors.  Later that day we did some shape cutting activities.  Princess uses scissors all the time, but she is not often required to cut along a line to make a specific shape.  Her favourite cutting activity was this simple Frog Craft from DLTK. 

Our shape for the Snow theme was the Hexagon because it has 6 sides and a snowflake has 6 points.  We started a shape unit for "Math" and Princess is working on consistently recognizing circle, square, and triangle without hints!!  Recognizing circle and square came up on a 2 year old skill checklist that I was researching, and Princess knows them, but can't (or won't) always remember the word "square".  I made up a booklet for her with worksheets and pictures made up of circles, squares, and triangles and she really enjoyed this (mainly because when she finished each sheet she got to put a smelly apple sticker on her page!)  The sheets I used came from Kids Learning Station and KidZone.  Princess especially enjoyed the pictures on the KidZone pages and got to take 1 worksheet home per day (the others are in her folder).  This week, we'll review circle, square, and triangle and add rectangle (and possibly oval, depending on how she's doing!).  Another shape activity that we did was sorting buttons by shape.  This took a bit of explaining, but once she got it it went very quickly!  I used these great new boxes I found at the dollar store, but it was tricky because I didn't have a triangle shape box, so we were putting triangle buttons in the hexagon box... I think this might have confused her.  Anyway, she did great and I finally got her to start saying which shape each button was as she was putting it in the right box.  We used a bowl for all the other buttons, and we didn't use the heart box, because it would have distracted her too much!!!

Anyways, we did some other snow activities and shape activities- dancing like a snowflake, shape sticker sorting and the like, but I did a really bad job of documenting last week!!  I'll try to get more detail about what we are doing this week for our Star Theme.  Hope you enjoyed the post!

Jennifer