What a wonderful and busy week we had back from Christmas filled with all things M!
We first got ourselves in the winter spirit by decorating our bulletin board with skating mice from one of our favorite books Mice On Ice. So much personality in each mouse, just like each one of our special Hoots!
On the feast day of the epiphany we were visited by the Three Magi who came to bless us and our room with holy water for the new year.
After we received our blessing and learned about the Three Magi's visit to baby Jesus, we finger painted beautiful crosses to display in the main building.
Keeping with our M theme, we read a wonderful winter story The Mitten by Jan Brett.
In the story, a young boy asks his grandmother to knit him snow white mittens. Although she warns him that snow white mittens will easily get lost he promises that he will keep up with them. While out playing, the young boy does in fact drop a mitten and a number of forest animals squeeze inside to stay warm. After many animals squeeze in, it is a tiny field mouse that causes a big bear to sneeze sending all of the animals flying out of the mitten and the mitten in the air which is then recovered by the little boy. The grandmother was happy to see that the young boy had kept up with his mittens but was puzzled as to why one was so stretched out.
We retold the story of the mitten with our own manipulatives that we made.
First we colored and cut out each of the eight animals that fit into the mitten.
Next, we put our "sewing" skills to work lacing our mittens together.
Then, we retold the story and as each animal squeezed itself into the mitten we placed our animal cut out inside.
We continued our Mitten study by completing a journal page titled "My mitten is so big a _______ could fit in it." There were so many fun, imaginative journal entries including animals, automobiles, landmarks, and even a handful of super heroes!
We completed our study of The Mitten by making tissue paper mittens to hang in our window for the month of January. So many beautiful colors, these mittens definitely wouldn't get lost in the snow!
This week we began our study of money with the Penny. First we learned that the penny is a coin, is worth 1 cent, and is the only coin that is not silver. After coloring our penny books we practiced identifying the penny by sorting coins. Too bad it was only play money!
Happy birthday to Miss Taylor who turned 5 over the break! Thank you for sharing yummy snowman doughnuts with us before we left for the Christmas holiday!
