Snowman and Gingerbread People Fun - Florida Style

With Christmas so close, we decided last week to focus on activities related to Christmas so everyone would be engaged and excited.  As you can see, the younger children really enjoy decorating the kids Christmas Tree, taking decorations off, and redecorating again.  I love that they will work side by side to decorate it.  Such sweet Super Friends.  

The VPK age and three year olds enjoyed playing the Build a Gingerbread Man game.  They had to wait a turn for this game, roll the dice, and then find the number of dots to know which item to add to their gingerbread man.  Waiting for a turn is a very hard task for three and four year olds.

Below are some of the learning games we put together this weekend.  You can see that they use fine motor skills to open and close the mittens glued onto clothes pins, and to attach the links on the cards for the gingerbread math activity.  Also you can see that they are using math skills to read the number, subitize (or count if necessary) the gingerbreads on the ten frame, count the gumdrops, and lastly count the cute gingerbread sticks grouped into fives.  We also have word "lights" with some of our recent sight words, and the children chose a word then choose the letters to hang up that make the word.  Each game has a visual description of how to play it so the children remember steps.  

 The Candy Cane ten frame game we just read the number, subitized or counted the candy canes, and added the appropriate number of tiny erasers to make 10.  We didn't worry about adding the number on the line to make the full equation.  We will add that part tomorrow.

Since we were talking about snowmen today, we added a few Florida (no snow) natural snowmen to talk about how many circles we needed for a snowman, and attributes of our face (eyes, nose, mouth) and body parts such as arms.  We also included a little discussion about feelings.  The white snowman is simply cork sprayed white.  We made a snowman for each child's name so they can practice putting their letters in order and the younger children get familiar with the letters in their name.  They can also practice spelling friends names if they choose to.  They are stored in envelopes with the names on the front to assist with the order of letters.

This little snowman ornament we made at our Parent's Night Out / Kid's Christmas Party.  It was easy, fun, and they had fun with it.  However, it is glass, not plastic like I thought. 😲

Everyone has still been enjoying working in the usual centers as well.  You can see the block center "under construction" as the two and three year olds are working on building.  

Sometimes in VPK we have one round of centers such as the first two on the easel on this page, then they can choose anything from the literacy or math centers.  This Sort n' Shape was her choice of free centers.

We had been seeing many bad choices.  Then we brought the "Super Friend chain" or "Helping Hand" chain back into play.  So many nice choices are encouraged by this chain!  Every time it touches the floor, we take a piece of paper out of our idea jar with something written on it.  Last week we had a trip to a fantastic Lakeland park which the children thoroughly enjoyed!  I wonder what we will get next time we have reached the floor.

We read at least 3 books every day.  Since we were going to donate last Friday at a local collection tent, we read about Howard B Wigglebottom and the

Look at these cuties!  They carried the presents in to the Holiday Tent.  They wanted to fill others full of Hope.  Then we went for a quick tour to see how they sort the items and get them ready for some one to "shop" when they come pick up their food.  In the van, almost all the way to the tent, they were singing Jingle Bells very loudly!

This is from the Parent Night Out/Kids night in.  These are melted snowmen - just hot glue with stuff stuck in for body parts.  The gingerbread cookies they had fun decorating, then ate them of course. :)

This is the youngest child that came to Parent Night Out this past week.  She was doing her job exploring and learning about shapes and dumping them on the floor. 😲 But she helps pick up now as well.