Painting on the wall....what??!!!?

During all this construction, we are having to deal with many sounds (jack hammers, drilling, digging) happening outside our room, and lots to see while on the playground. It is very exciting, and very frustrating all at once.
To lighten the darkness of the hallways we decided to decorate the construction walls. We had a HUGE discussion that our classroom walls, and walls at home are not something that needs decoration. However our construction wall, boring and white-needed some preschool love.
It was one of the happiest times I have had with these little Octopi all year. True joy.

Pete the Cat: Roll and put on buttons

We have been reading MANY Pete the Cat stories. One thing I love to do is connect our stories to other activities. The children had their own shirts (much like Pete) and had to roll to put on buttons (addition) and then roll to take them off (subtraction). Many math skills were being taught, and improved upon: subitizing (die dot patterns)
rote counting
turn taking
addition and subtraction basics

Brown Bear M&M Color sort

Since starting this year, we have been learning colors, matching colors, and how to sorting by color. This week we have been reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see? In order to make sorting very tasty we sorted M&M's by color to match the characters in our book! Preschool is a yummy place to learn!

journals

We are going to turn into amazing writers-either learning to write our names, sounds we hear, or sight words we have learned. Along with writing we will learn to color with a variety of materials, and how to draw representational pictures.
Today we colored a crayon to represent our favorite colors!

Rules, rules, rules

We talked a lot of rules today. Along with rules, we talked about ways that we could positively follow them. The Octopi made a promise to me that they would follow these rules. We signed them and they are posted in our room for a reminder.
Our three rules:
1. Take care of yourself
2. Take care of your friends
3. Take care of your environment

Painting with a purpose

Part of the Responsive Classroom Approach is opening the classroom together, building that community, and understanding each center (how to play, clean up, and share materials).  Monday we opened the art easel together; we learned to paint! Preschool is a messy beautiful place! There are a lot of steps to deciding to paint-the best part was creating our first pictures (many of them painted me-so flattered!) Now that the easel is open the children can choose to paint everyday if they want. Each theme change the paint colors change but also the materials might as well (i.e. temper paint, water color, dot paint, finger paint, rollers).

New year, new room

I am so excited to start the year, meet all the new Octopus friends, and see my returning Octopi. I moved classrooms over the summer, so getting the room ready has been a work in progress, but I think it is almost there-just missing the busy bodies of the preschoolers!
The classroom has many different centers, that we will explore together in order to open up the classroom for free choice throughout the year. This is part of the Responsive Classroom Philosophy that we do "guided discoveries" together in order to model how to play and interact with materials safely and appropriately, and how to take care of the environment and clean up when done exploring.