Winter Themed Door Decorations

This is our fully decorated door for the Winter Door Decorating Contest. It is Snoopy's dog house, Snoopy, Woodstock and friends. The students' names are written across each line of lights that were glittered by the students. There are 4 birds with each students face on them. The students also helped by adding the snowflakes using fingerprints. We may have splurged by adding the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree but it was a necessary splurge. 

Winter Board

The board in our classroom. It displays some winter animals and what tree looks like in the winter. Our walruses are slightly misplaced since they tend to live in icy cold water but were too cute to pass on. 

New winter look for our tree. 

Winter Bulletin Board

This is our hallway bulletin board. We made the hats and mittens after talking about what a person needs to wear to play outside. We used our calendar weather clothes and figured out what we could put on a snowman to decorate him. I didn't notice until the students were done decorating the mittens that they were both of left hands. The students used lots of fun decorations to make the gloves their "own". The did most of the cutting too. The snowmen are up because this is a common winter activity...when there is snow.

Rainy (Part 2) and Wind

 In terms of lesson planning, this day went terribly wrong on several different occasions. It was supposed to be about wind and two of the four wind activities did not work at all...
The day started by me drawing a kite on the board. I asked the boys about it. What is this? How does it work?
   They told me that they had to run with it then Jordan yelled out that it needed to be windy! I had put streamers on the fan and we watched how "wind" made the streamer move. That one worked!
      Next we tried to make pin wheels that looked really easy but the folding and cutting of them was too much and an adult needed to do it and they would even spin. We said we'd try a different one in the spring sometime.
     Next to show how air/wind made things move, I tied up a ribbon, put a two inch straw on it and taped a blown up balloon to it. The hope was that it was jet down the line across the room...it went no where! I ended up blowing balloons up for about 5 minutes and letting them chase them around the room.
     The last thing I had planned was to use the boats in the water table and blow air through a straw as if they were on the ocean. This worked! This turned into an unintended sink and float lesson because we had the balloon. I filled one with air. Will this sink or float? Everyone said float. We tested it and they were right. I filled one with water. Will this sink or float? Everyone said sink. We tested it and they were right. I filled one with green water then blew air into it. The kids were spilt. In fact, it doesn't do either. It bobs about the water and air meet. It was cool because they got to see it.

That was all the air stuff which I couldn't take pictures of because everyones hands were busy. The rain activity was a clear cup half full of water and shaving cream. We used food coloring as a water like liquid to fill up our cloud (shaving cream). The boys are adding their liquid to the cloud. It was really neat because the food coloring obviously changed the color of the water.

Then they were giving more shaving cream to play/practice writing their names. This turned into a mess too!  Kingston said, "Mrs. McCoy, if I clap my hand together really hard I can make snow!" Before I could say anything all three of them were "making snow"and it got everywhere. Faces, hair and floor. It was a fun day to be in Pre-K, a little crazy but they really liked it.

Rain and Rainbows

 To start the conversation about rain, I drew a cloud on the white board and rain drops coming from it. I asked the students if they knew what the picture was, they all knew it was rain. We talked about how rain is wet and can be cold rain or a warm rain depending on what time of year it happens. We did an experiment to represent rain going through a cloud the day after only because we ran out of time. These giant rain clouds are cottons balls glue to paper and stapled to a hanger with 6 raindrops hanging from it.
    After talking about rain, we had to talk about a rainbow. The fruit loop activity was a great review of colors and color sorting. It also helped the students work on their fine motor skills having to pick up and place each fruit loop in the right place.

Weather (Sunny and Partial Sunny/Cloudy)

    One December 3rd, we started weather week with sunny and cloudy. We have talked about the weather everyday during circle time when we do the calendar activities but temperature was getting confused with types of weather.
     The main focus of this week was to determine the type of weather we were noticing and the temperature outside. This was a funny week to study weather being that was almost 70 one day and snowing a day later.
    The picture one the upper left was just the sun, or sunny. The students hand painted a circle then make hand prints around the edge for the rays. The students added glitter to make it sparkle.
     The picture in the lower left is what a cloudy day may look like. The students cut out the yellow circle sun and two white ovals. Then they glued these all onto the blue paper and added a few cotton balls over the ovals. We helped them hot-glue yellow pipe cleaners on for the rays.
      We talked about how the sun makes things warms or hot and how the days were getting shorter because we are getting less sunlight than in the summer time.

Fall Unit (other activities)

The scarecrow keeps crows away from the corn or pumpkin fields.

The acorn that squirrels collet to prepare for winter. 

Our turkeys

Here are some of the activities we completed during the Fall unit. These activities focused on using scissors, glueing and following directions.

This was our Fall bulletin board.