The Nutcracker
By: Susan
Jeffers (pair with Tchaikovsky’s music)
Dec 3rd and 5th
This week was a lot of fun!!! We read The Nutcracker by Susan Jeffers. While we read the book we listened to Tchaikovsky's music. The Busy Bees loves it!
The first day went well, we started with free play and Journal time. It seems the kids are getting a hang of journals and starting to put it all together :)
Circle time was their favorite this week, I had the Toody Ta song and London Bridges. What a great time, all the kids really got into the Toody Ta.
Here are pictures from Tuesday
The kids loved the book, and for our activity we talked about how boys bow and girls curtsy to each other. They all looked at me like I was weird, I think Stewart was the only one that actually bowed.
We headed out side to the "big area" and let the kids run around. We lost a ball over the fence by the busy street. Most of the kids REALLY wanted to go get it...after much discussion we all decided it was better left on the busy street and that eight 4 year olds and one 2 year old wouldn't make a good retrieving party on the busy road.
For our Math lesson we made Christmas trees (like the one in the book). They had to arrange the strips of green paper from shortest to longest. They all did really good with that.
For our craft we glued the strips of paper down and decorated them like Christmas trees. It is so fun to watch how different each tree turned out.
Ava (she had to cover each strip of paper with dots)
Logan
Tyson
Blake
Luke (He informed me these were Star Wars ornaments)
Stewart
Trevor
For our phonics lesson we did Mouse Mess and the kids did great. No pictures of that sorry :( We missed Margaret today, so glad she could join us Thursday!
Thursday the kids were so excited to sing the Toody Ta song. They laughed through the whole song!!! I might have snapped to many pictures but they were having so much fun I couldn't resist :)
See Tyson and Trevor are enjoying circle time in their own way, LOVE IT!!!!
I love this one!!!
After we read the book we talked about what a ballet was and then I had them watch part of a ballet for our activity. They were surprised to see that boys dance too! Then a few of the boys decided they wanted to point out who they wanted to marry. I nicely informed them that no one is marring anyone ;) After they watched the video they all wanted to jump around and dance like ballerinas
For our craft we made spinning nutcracker puppets. They had so much fun making them!! I didn't get any pictures of the making, it was more involved then I thought it would be. So here is a nice completed picture.
For our phonics lesson we did Monster Mask. They decorated their mask with "M" words and wrote M's on the mask. We Marched to Monster Mash Music with our Monster Mask on.
Centers went great this week, they seem to always enjoy this part. I was trying to emphasize pattern making so I would go around and try to get them to follow a pattern I made and then have them make up their own.
Book look is always a favorite for all!!! It was a great week, all the Busy Bees are super fun and they have grown so much from the beginning of the year. Thanks for sharing your Busy Bees with me :)
