Dramatic Play
During the last weeks of November, our pumpkin patch transformed into a picnic space! We make sure to pack everything we need for our picnic, including plates; cups; fruit; drinks; bread; and condiments, and invite our peers and furry creatures to join us. Our favorite part was making delicious sandwiches for our friends to try. Some friends especially loved eating our deluxe, hand-crafted sweet and savory sandwich, which was overstuffed with lettuce, bologne, peanut butter, jam, and tomatoes! Other friends enjoyed more traditional sandwiches. We also liked looking through the binoculars and pretending that we were on the lookout for wild animals, teachers, and friends!
Block Area
The train tracks have continued to be a huge hit. We try to connect all the tracks to create various routes for our trains to travel on. When we’re not playing with the trains, we like setting up ramps at different levels and rolling the ball down them, or playing with the farm animals. We also like driving the fire trucks around the classroom and pretending to be firefighters who will save buildings, toys, and people.
Nature Area
We love looking at the seashells and discussing with our friends about how similar or different they are from each other. We also enjoy looking at the globe and finding San Francisco and other countries that our peers and teachers have visited.
Quiet Area
When we want to take a break from other activities in the classroom, we like reading books with our peers and teachers. Some favorites include: “How Do Dinosaurs Choose Their Pets?” “Curious George Goes Camping,” and “Pigs Make Me Sneeze.” We’ve also loved looking at all the different animals in the encyclopedia and learning about some of their features.
Music Area
Each week we look forward to Thursdays with Charity. We always have a blast singing and dancing to her songs, especially the grateful song; the picnic song that we co-create with her; and the green tree song. We often have these songs stuck in our heads (and in our teachers’ heads) all day. We also loved singing and dancing to the “scarfity-scarf” song and getting our wiggles out in the wiggle song. During the days that we stayed inside because of the Camp Fire, we continued to practice singing and dancing to Charity’s songs, making everyday feel like a “Charity Day!”
Art Area
One of our favorite things to do in the art area is tracing the outlines of figures with assorted pebbles. Not only is this quite peaceful to do, but we also like looking at how the figure turns out with the pebbles on top. Our favorite one, and the one we think is the silliest, is the one with the outline of a face! We’ve also been having lots of fun drawing pictures for our mommies and daddies, as well as making colorful turkeys for Thanksgiving.
Gross Motor Area
When we have lots of energy that we want to get out, we love jumping and wrestling with our friends on the mattress. We also love the thrill of jumping from the slide to the mattress and are working very hard to jump even farther!
Cognitive Area
Our love for creativity often attracts us to the Magna Tiles, which we use to build all sorts of objects, such as castles, houses, trains, and airplanes. We especially love playing with the magnetic maze board and tracing lines with the magnetic pen. Although the maze is challenging, we feel very proud of ourselves when we figure it out.
Outside
Inspired by our love for Charity’s building a tree house song, we’ve been building tree houses with the pipes. We try to use all of the pipes and sometimes we build rocket ships as well to go to outer space. While some friends build with the pipes, other friends work together to build castles using the blocks, being extra careful so as not to knock down the creation. Our mud kitchen has also been really busy. We love making soups, muffins, cake, and ice-cream and inviting our friends over for a dessert party! We also enjoy riding on the swing by ourselves and with friends, sometimes going round and round until we get dizzy or going as high as possible to feel as if we’re flying.