Gingerbread and jingle bells continued

We are close to finishing up week 1 of gingerbread and jingle bell theme.

 I think it is important to educate the kids on different holidays just so that they know the history of them and may have a friend that does not celebrate Christmas, but a  different Holiday.

  On Tuesday Hanukkah was the Holiday we learned about, since I am 1/2 Jewish, I was looking forward to teach the kids more about it.  

 A menorah was a new thing for them. Instead of having just one day to open presents, Hanukkah was for 8 days and a present was given each night . 

Kaelis said "no fair" ha! 

 We looked at a menorah on the web aijnd went over each peice and what each one meant when lighting the candles.

Every month funshine provides sign language words that goes  with the topic we are talking about and  yesterday we learned  the word cookie in sign language .

We read The gingerbread man.

I like to read this book with different voices. Especially the Rhyme.

  Run,run, as fast as you can,

You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!

After we read the book, the girls decided they were going to reinact the story.

One of them was the gingerbread man and then one of them was the different animals. 

We made the cutest gingerbread puppets that came in the funshine express box. 

I added real cinnamon so they smelled so good. 

Funshine has the best games and they are easy I play and understand.

For example , we played the Gingerbread Run math game.

The kids roll the dice with a number and then they move their game pieces that any spaces . 

We had a busy first half of the week and today we had a snow day. 

 What things do you do in snow days?

Joyful jamboree finale

On Friday we finished our joyful jamboree theme. The kids really enjoyed making all the Christmas crafts and learning about all different kinds of holidays and events. I personally enjoy it as well. 

The girls are getting so good at cutting and pasting with a pattern. Check out these elf shoes them made. 

 

Funshine provided this really fun game where one put a picture of a toy under a present and then the other person would try to remember where it was or I had them give clues to what you was underneath it.

The girls had a lot fun with it . 

We had a sickness going around last week so our curriculum was cut short a little, but all seem well so we are back at it. 

Candle talk

I hope  everybody had a good weekend. We are enjoying our second week of Joy Jamboree. Funshine provided so many fun things, we are exploring so many things.

Today we talked about candles and how different candles mean different things for certain holidays, Christmas advent wreaths,Jewish menorahs and kwanza kinaras. Candles are used to shine a little light, or make a room smell good.

Some days the kids want to be involved in so much, and other days I am lucky if I get 5 mins.

One of the games we played was Jack b nimble, jack be quick, but I changed jack to the kids name.

 For example: Lena be nimble

                       Lena be quick

                        Lena jumped over the  

                       Candlestick.

They had so much fun with it. We jumped over small ones only, tall ones, all of them and discussed which were harder to jump over.

Seasonal stockings was the creative arts today. They were so cute and simple to make.  The tricky part of it was the fine motor of lacing the string, after sometime we got it!

I enjoy watching the faces as they work so hard stringing the stocking.

Funshine extras is a really great resource. I printed this matching game. They have to match the uppercase letter to the lower case letter. Lower case (or baby as we call them) can be a hard thing to catch on to. Usually the uppercase is the easiet because they learn that first. 

This game was great to learn the lowercase. They could also match the color the light and that helped get it along 

We had such a busy day today learning so many fun things. I look forward to spreading for funshine knowledge tomorrow.

Joyful Jamboree

I have always loved the word Joy and it happens to be my middle name, so maybe I am a little partial to it.

 Funshine has a bunch of Joy in all the activities we are doing. I love Christmas crafts so I jumped with joy  when I looked  inside the curriculum box. 

 This week was filled with many things to keep us busy.

 The girls cut paper and wrapped boxes for at least 30 mins. This was a favorite for sure.

Fun shine included this fun game that included a cube with gross motor activities and then a number that was picked and that is how many times they did the movement.

 It was so fun and even the little ones enjoyed doing what the big kids did.

One thing I Enjoy about teaching preschool is how much the children really soak up, even though it seems like they are not listening or not focused, but then you just observe and notice things like this.

 They are looking at the word wall and pointing to the words and also looking at the color wheel. How great is that?

 I play the same circle time song everyday and as soon as I play it, the young ones get so excited and start clapping and then get a carpet square. 

 I know they are to young to sit the whole time, but they are so intent and listening when they do sit.

We learned a song today that was from the funshine curriculum and it goes like this:

(To the tune of twinkle twinkle lite star)

 Twinkle . Twinkle holiday star 

On our tree is where you are 

Sparkle, sparkle, shine so bright ,

Watch for Santa in the night,

If you see him will you please,

Tell him "thank you" just for me.

This is so simple and cute. I heard little twinkle songs being sung.

Wreaths were made today. 

 What are some of your favorite crafts to do?

Joyful

Welcome to December. Is it me or did November just fly away? 

 We enjoyed all the fun things Funshine planned for us last month and we are very excited for the activities that are planned for this month.

 Christmas music is playing in the background and the room looks festive and we are ready to for some fun.

 The fireflies themes are Joyful Jambiree and Jingle bells.

 Today we welcomed everybody back from Thanksgiving break.

 Joyful was the focus today. 

I love how Funshine provides a character counts section. Today we introduced Jacey the joyful Jaguar.

  Jacey is always joyful and always smiling. 

To go along with being joyful we made a Joy card.

 When I passed out the materials and we talked about each item, Kaelis says "candy canes bring me Joy." 

  I love how different they look, but using the same items.

We also read . Elf on the shelf.

 Our elf will be returning to our school room tomorrow so we had to remember all the rules.

I got these a felt activities and the girls had a great time designing their own.