Tuesday, September 4, 2012

P Is For a Perfect Week!

When looking at Amelia's "list of things she loves and wants to learn more about'; I came across the name Pinkerella. Pinkerella is her beloved pink stuffed penguin. So I decided to focus our week on the letter P, the color pink, penguins and pies. Here is what the week looked like...

We had some great fine motor activities such as putting letter P pictures on the coins that go in our piggy bank, putting letter P pictures on a giant P with glue dots and connecting the animal that begins with P to it's home. I was super impressed with how Amelia caught on to the last activity. We haven't discussed animal habitats often and she knew right away that a pigeon can be found in a city and a polar bear can be found in a snowy mountain.
For Math and Literacy Activities I had an "Awesome Penguin Fact Match Up". I found out some cool facts about penguins like; the Magellanic Penguin makes underground nesting colonies during mating seasons. I told Amelia some facts and then gave her a penguin on a clothes pin. She had to match the penguin to the fact.
I also took out my old pizza game. I made this game using a pizza image off the internet. I printed two copies and on one I made slices with different colored items and different numbers of the items. For example there are 5 brown meatballs and 4 green broccoli pieces. This was an absolute favorite in my preschool class. The pizza slices are laminated and attached to the larger pizza by velcro. The song goes like this, "Pizza Pizza On My Dish. What Kind of Pizza Do You Wish?" Here is a moment of sharing with brother.

Songs are always a great way to learn different concepts. I use songs often for counting activities. I discovered a cute counting poem about penguins and cut/laminated 5 adorable penguins for the felt board. Each penguin has some velcro on the back so it sticks better. Amelia wanted to do this every single morning.

For my felt board I attached some felt to the back of an old picture frame from IKEA that had a plastic backing. It works perfectly. Last week we used it for my cut out felt ballerinas.

For Art and Sensory Activities we "Painted like Professionals" :)
I gave them both real rollers and a real paint bin to put the paint in. I was disappointed to not have a lot of pink paint but we used reds and purples. Amelia was fascinated by the word "professional". I told her if you work really hard and learn all that you can about something; you can be a professional at it. She told me she would like to be a "professional princess".
I have had a sensory bucket of pink stuff for a while now. It was a hit this week.
Other highlights of our week included making Pink Lemonade after her favorite book Pinkalicious and The Pink Drink. I didn't have fresh lemons but a whole lot of light lemonade cans. And we added strawberries to it so it would be a bit more pink; just like the story.
Creating

Pouring

Enjoying
We also had a letter P hunt, a trip to the Playground, a puppet show and Charlie really enjoyed watching a live web cam of penguins at Discovery.com. It's crazy adorable!

It was an awesome week!