An Apple a Day...

Decorating for the beginning of the school year, we made these cute little apple hand prints. Using red to paint their palms, and green to paint a finger for the stem :) They'll be a perfect first hand print to put in our hand print books!

Now we know our ABC'S!

We finally finished our letters this week! I was hoping to get them all done by September and we finally did! A few years ago we went to a training for Handwriting Without Tears and have been using it ever since. It really is such an amazing program, and have never seen anything work so fast and so effectively with the children.

They say not to work on pushing letters to hard before age 4, so I try to keep it all really light, fun, and easy going the first year. We started in about January after giving the munchkins a few months to settle in. For each letter we start by introducing it at circle time. I draw it first on the easel and we discuss how to write it using HWT terms (big line, little line, big curve, little curve). Then each child takes a turn writing it.

Then we go to tables and do the letter worksheet from the Handwriting Without Tears My First School Book (used to be Get Set For School). I just make copies of the pages the first year and then this year they will be doing their own workbook. After they finish their workbook they get a date stamp and a Hello Kitty stamp (obv) :)

Usually within the next day or so we make a letter collage. I cut out the lines or curves and the children use glue sticks to glue them onto construction paper. I keep them all connected and they just got to take them home this week.

To celebrate finishing our letters I bought the kids cheez-it letters, and magnetic letters & numbers for the classroom :)

Best munckin drawing of all time...

I CAN'T. This munchkin already reminds me SO much of myself at her age, it's crazy. She drew me this picture, and it will FOREVER be my favorite. It's me and her fighting a zombie, I'm on the right and she is on the left (obviously the zombie is in the middle). I apparently needed "blue on my black hair like Katy Perry", two knives to kill the zombie, a zebra dress, and "firework pants". Also, I have a pet zebra and she has a pet horse.

So much WIN in this picture.

Graduation

Since I had the younger group this past year, and I went all out crazy for our first graduation last year, my co teacher and I decided to settle with a family picnic for her "graduating" kids this year. I put together little bags for each of the children in her group including a bobble head from Oriental Trading (I wrote their names on the front and 2012 on the back), Congratulation Frames, also from OT (and had the children wearing the caps we used at last years graduation), a CD filled with pictures from throughout their 2 years in our room, and a "diploma" (I'm pretty sure I found those in the dollar section at Target and tied some red ribbon around it).

But seriously, I'm already mentally planning the Rockstar Graduation for my munchkins next year :p

Preschool Apocalypse

This really has nothing to do with teaching, but I couldn't help feel so proud with the little munchkins when they started drawing Zombies with the chalk outside on the playground. It is days like this that I KNOW I chose the right path in life, I seriously LOVE them!

Self Portraits

One thing I can't stand is empty walls! In attempting to fill up some space, I decided instead of the small portraits we usually have the children draw to put on our closet door, we should have them draw large black and white ones to fill up all the empty space in our block area. I drew myself first to show the children, and explain to them to draw all parts (head, eyes, hair, nose, mouth, body, arms, legs, etc.)

They came out really cute really show the different levels of all the children. They absolutely love looking at them too, and pointing our themselves and their friends. We also laminated them so that they would last longer.