Our actual weather might not show that it is winter time but in the Octopus Room it is now a winter wonderland!
We have everything from snowmen, to mittens, hot cocoa, and instant snow! We will learn about penguins and polar bears, sort items that are hot and cold, frozen and melted, and create many amazing winter projects. We will make snowflakes, snowmen, polar bears, penguins, snowballs, and mittens. We will read 4 amazing stories: "The Mitten," "The Hat," "Polar bear Polar Bear, What do you hear?", and "The Snowy Day." We have two new journal activities that work on writing and drawing skills. We will learn how to measure with a non standard unit (mittens) to see how tall we are (it will make a great class book!)
Our classroom has a place to ice skate, build a snowman, throw snowballs, make hot chocolate, and roast marshmallows. We became investigators using our magnifying glass to find the snowmen matches, and sort pictures by frozen and melted. Since it is not snowing outside, thank goodness for instant snow so that we can build, and play with that frozen, fluffy, white stuff! At this point in the year a lot of writing is being introduced around the room, as well as in whole group and small group times. The centers where finding your name to sign up have been replaced with sign in to play sheets. They will need to write their names to sign up to play in a select few centers. The morning message routine is also changing. The children are now having to help me fill in the missing letters, eventually words, to fix the morning message so it makes sense. We start with missing beginning sounds, and eventually move into spelling words that we know!
So much learning left to do this school year....
