Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Reminder of being Thankful


My Daughter had posted our thankful tree from Thanksgiving last year on her Face book page. It reminded me to share and idea for families. Every year for many years I have made thankful trees with my class with leaves that have the things they are thankful for written on them. Several years ago, I thought why have I never done this at home with my own children. My own children are grown now, but it was not too late to share with grandchildren. We have added leaves every year for 2 or 3 years now. I can't wait until the tree is so full of leaves from many years of family sharing what we are thankful for.
I set out to find the right twig and pot to put the twig in. I cemented the twig in the pot and die cut many fall colored leaves and a couple of turkeys for my grandsons.
On the pot I wrote the Bible vs. "Give thanks to God for he is good, his unfailing love endures forever" Psalms 107:1. Everyone celebrating thanksgiving with us adds a leaf. We change houses for Thanksgiving so the tree travels with us. For at least a minute each person stops and thinks of one blessing for that year. It makes a great table decoration and now I have shared with my family something I have shared with little children for so many years.

Monday, September 27, 2010

So many ideas...... hard to choose

Every year I struggle to decide what to use and what to leave behind for another year. Teaching Pre K children is a blessing. They are eager, and excited and hesitant and imaginative, and straight forward.

We have been having alot of fun getting use to our class and our routine. We made a collage this week using our favorite color. We let them use crayons, markers, colored pencils, pieces of construction paper, feathers, and dobbers. They turned out very nicely and allowed lots of freedom of expression. I had tooo many choices for art this week I try to find things that go with the theme or the letter. Favorites was our theme, our letter was Dd, we did dot art using markers making tiny dots to create a picture. You could also do drip art using droppers and thinned tempra, or doodle art, just letting them doodle all over the page. You see what I mean there are tooo many choices. I have used all of the choices I described and probably would have done the drip art had we not been having our pictures made that day. We had to stay clean :)

Next week we will be doing letter Gg and will be using glitter, glue, and green for our art experiences. Well enough for now, I will be adding more later.
Well, the week is now over, and what a messy week. Glitter, glue, garbage painting, and a puppet of our letter friend Gus the Goat. My goodness what a week.
The best part of our goat puppet was we cut a small hole in his mouth so he could eat garbage.
Kid's loved him. Thanks Frogstreetpress for great letter friends.

New year, new class, new fun






Well a new year of teaching is in full swing, and using some old and new ideas makes it all the more fun. Every year we spend September learning about our school, our selves and our friends.
Today we learned about our families and some of our favorite things. A fun activity is to trace the childrens arm and hand spread on brown paper for the tree, then I have seen the remainder of the tree done many ways, have them tear green paper into pieces for leaves, make leaves with markers, but we used our thumbs and green paint to make ours. As you will see from the picture they had freedom to place their leaves where they chose. We then used red paint and thumbs to make our family members. We created a family tree. We are proudly displaying our family trees in our room right now