The Very First Thanksgiving Day

 Now I know why it's nice to post right after preschool is at your house......so you can remember it.  :)

The week before Thanksgiving we read the book The Very First Thanksgiving Day.  I honestly can't really remember much about that day. Man, I'm losing it.

 I do know that we went outside to search for our leaves to make our turkeys.

 

 Thursday rings a few more bells for me.  We colored our pilgrim and Indian hats.

 We make more turkeys.

 The best part - eating the left overs.

 Margaret only got 2 feathers done because she was eating her treats instead of putting them on the turkey. :)

 Our cute little pilgrims

 Brave little Indians - Trevor was refusing to wear the hat or get in the picture for some reason.

Happy (Belated) Thanksgiving!

Merry Christmas, Big Hungry Bear!

T'was the last week of preschool before Christmas break... and we read the most delightful story! I was familiar with the authors and illustrator of this book, but not this specific title. It was a great read and teaches the lesson to be kind and thoughtful to everyone. The kiddos caught on to the message and loved it.

 

 

We looked at all the presents and hidden shapes in the story and then went on a shape search in my house. They got it! They found circle tables and clocks, rectangle doors and windows...stars on the Christmas tree. Each time we found a shape in the house, we collected a small shape made of paper.  After we had found all the shapes, we matched them up with shapes on a paper and glued them together.

 

 

For our craft, we made Christmas trees with different shapes (from candy) as decorations. The kids could have done this forever if we had the time. The hardest part was not eating as they went!

 

After reading the story on Thursday, we decided to be nice and give back like the mouse does in the story.  So we made a treat we could give away. 

 



 

We dipped pretzels in chocolate and jazzed them up with Christmas sprinkles.

 Here is a finished product.  I think they were starting to understand that it is better to give, than to receive.

 



 

For our craft this time, we made an ornament.  We took cut up straws and jammed them into styrofoam balls to make a Christmas star.  The kids kept calling them firecrackers instead of stars. Fair enough--as the original idea was 4th of July/Christmas Ornaments, depending on the colors you used.  This took them longer than we had time for but they liked doing it nonetheless. You can see what a finished product looks like here.  Kudos to this website for my craft ideas this time! 

 

Merry Christmas from the Busy Bees!



Happy Halloween!

So sorry it has taken me so long to post about Halloween! We had a fun week.

 

Ava decorated a letter P for pumpkin!

 

We learned about small, medium and large. We cut out three different size pumpkins and glued them on a paper. Then we sorted pumpkin buttons by the three sizes and matched them up with the pumpkins on our papers. 

We bobbed for apples,

 



  and gathered up leaves.

 

 

We crushed up our leaves  

 

 and spread them onto a pumpkin we outlined with glue. 

 

Check out our costumes!

 

Blake as a knight

 



 

Stewart as a Dodgers player

 



 

Ava as a witch

Margaret as a witch

 



Luke as Peter Pan



 

 and Trevor as a skeleton!

 



Happy Halloween Busy Bees 2012!

 



11/29/2012

Gingerbread Baby

I only had the kids for one day but we had a lot of fun. The kids loved the book. For the activity we talked about what came first, next and last. All the kids did really good with it. 

The craft was putting together their own gingerbread man.

Snack time. We had apples and animal crackers. They had fun eating the heads off their animals.

I was going to take more pictures on Friday but then I canceled preschool!

Katy No-Pocket

 

Katy No Pocket was a lot of fun!  We started off the week by hopping around like kangaroos, on a hunt for the letter "K".  Their little hops were too cute!! These kiddos LOVE hunts of any kind.

 

Here they are with their pouches saying "Kangaroo!"

We made our own "jumping" kangaroos too.  We talked about how other Mommy animals carry their babies.  The kids all concurred that it was pretty cool that their own Mommies have a pouch (bellies) to carry babies and that Daddies can give us rides on their backs to carry them.

We pulled out my huge atlas book at Austrailia where kangaroos come from.  We talked about how it's an island and how it's surrounded by the ocean.  I gave them a little blurp about Aborginal art, it was of course way over their heads.  We watched this video together to teach us how to do our Aboriginal art craft.   

They were all about painting with a q-tip.  I thought they all did a great job!

 

I love that you can pull a ton of different themes from these books.  We spent one of the days talking about tools, as they are mentioned in the book.  I knew this would be a hit with Stewart, Blake, Luke and Trevor.  They colored some tools and matched them up.  

 

Loved my week with hopping Busy Bees!