Dramatic Play
To start off the school year, this area became a restaurant that included a kitchen, cooking appliances, a variety of foods, and menus! We enjoyed taking on roles such as: cashiers, chefs, customers, and servers; we even had uniforms to dress up as chefs! We loved ordering different types of foods on the menu throughout the day. The restaurant served breakfast, lunch, dinner, beverages and desserts. However, friends serve “special” items when customers are lucky— there was even chicken milk once! We definitely made the impossible, possible!
We really enjoyed using the cash registers as a train ticket dispenser, where it collected money and distributed tickets. Friends purchased a ticket and used the bed as the train station. Sometimes the train went slow when there was a traffic sign ahead and sometimes it went really fast!
Block Area
In the block area, we really enjoyed building very tall towers (and then crashing them!) We also created spaceships and rockets and construction trucks. Decorating the different rooms in the doll house was also very fun! There was a really long line in the doll house’s potty room once, but we lined up all the people and made sure they waited for their turn patiently. We loved the vehicles and street signs, as well as the dinosaurs. They were incorporated into many play scenarios. We used the balls and ramps for the vehicles as well as the blocks and loved trying to make long tracks.
Quiet Area
There were lots of books to choose from! Some of our favorites included, “Pete the Cat” and “Go Dog, Go!” We loved singing along with Pete throughout the story, as he rocked his school shoes. Any of the dinosaur books were also a big hit. We enjoyed playing with all the stuffed animals both in the tee pee and on the big bean bag. We liked going behind the bean bag and hiding and then using teamwork to help each other get out.
Art/Literacy
We really enjoyed creating art work for our parents! We drew castles, rockets, and animals! We loved playing with the play-doh, as we baked cookies, cakes, and sandwiches. We also built large mountains and had dump trucks go over them.; we built roads for the smaller cars to go through! Making bead necklaces was also really fun, especially when we used them to decorate our fingers! We loved the construction trucks and rocks and beans in the sensory table! We scooped and filled dump trucks, and drove them around making lots of roads.
Music Area ♫
The music area was filled with fun beats, as we drummed away. We really enjoyed collaborating with each other and looking for different sounds the drums made when hit at different locations. We also loved the frog guiros, and enjoyed figuring out how they worked. The scarves often became covers for our faces so we could become ghosts! But, we also enjoyed dancing to music with them.
Cognitive Area
There were lots of puzzles to choose from, however we especially enjoyed the dinosaur puzzle! There were different types of dinosaurs, including Stegosaurus, T-Rex, and Tyrannosaurus! We learned that some dinosaurs are herbivores and some are carnivores! we really enjoyed learning about the different types of dinosaurs and studying their colors. We loved counting the different types of fruits on the fruit chart! We also learned some of the different types of foods in Spanish from Lou, including: fresas (strawberries), bananas (banana), and manzanas (apples)!
Nature Area
We loved studying the plant blocks in the Nature Area! Some of the leafs included, maple leaf and chrysanthemum. We were also trying to figure out how the plants got inside the blocks. We really enjoyed using these blocks as a telephone to reach and communicate with our friends throughout the room. The magnifying glasses were used to explore many different things,even the fish tank! We loved looking through the viewfinders at all the different animals!
Gross Motor
We love jumping on the mattress together and have used it in lots of our play, pretending it is many different things. We love singing "no more monkeys jumping on the bed" while we act it out. The rocking horse is also a favorite. We often are taking turns riding it, and even giving different stuffed animals and babies rides.
Outside
We went on our first field trip (or adventure!) into Golden Gate Park! We searched for horses, tigers, and lions. Even though we didn't catch any of them this time, we saw many other cool animals such as ducks, squirrels, and blue birds- we even saw a raccoon family! We loved exploring around the lake and found many acorns and lots of different leaves and bark.
We spent a lot of time out in the backyard too! With the new climbing structure up and ready, we really enjoyed figuring our different ways to climb to the top! Once we got there, the possibilities were endless. Sometimes, it was a castle, house, doctor’s office, vet’s office, and a train station! We really enjoyed using the bigger logs on the play structure as trains that brought us all around the world, including outer space! In the sand pit, we really enjoyed digging for different types of "fossils." There were fish, starfishes, and turtles! We also loved using our dump trucks to load and unload cakes from one destination to another. We baked lots of birthday cakes for all of our friends! We had bark candles to blow and sang Happy Birthday. We loved playing and cooking in the mud kitchen too- especially on the hot days when it was filled with water! We also brought the sensory table outside for more water play and we washed rocks, filled containers and splashed around. The climbing wall and slides were lots of fun to do together an we often held hands down the slide and wanted to catch each other at the bottom.
