Maple room- recap

It has been a very busy few weeks for me, and I have gotten behind on my daily tidbits.  I will get back to doing the daily activities this next week, but for now, I want o recap what has been happening in each class.

The Maple room has been talking about construction and as part of that is doing the story of the three little pigs.  Our dramatic corner is a construction zone, we have great construction worker vests, hard hats, a lot of different kinds of blocks, and tools.  We made a construction bulletin board too.

The books we have read : " The house that max built" by Maxwell Newhouse, "Building a house" by Byron Barton, "Alphabet under construction" by Denise Fleming, "The three little pigs" by Charlotte Voake", "Alphabet Adventure" by Audry Wood, The Three little Pigs " as retold by Rochelle Larkin, "The three little pigs" (Disney Version), "My lucky day" by Keiki Kasza, "The three little pigs" as retold by Harriet Ziefert (AS you can see there are many versions of the Three little pigs- some end differently!  As part of our Three little pigs, the children also retold the story themselves and we wrote down what they each said for a book.


For art, we have done panting projects for our bulletin board, and for our three little pigs houses.  


We did a group painting project using giant rolling pins, and scrapers and squashers to make a picture we cut into building shapes for our bulletin board.  We also had small house shapes made out of cardboard and the children worked to decorate them with found objects.
We did a gluing letter collage project, we also used markers and crayons to illustrate the three little pigs story for our books.  We used trucks to make tire tracks painting.  Another day, we did "marble type painting" using bolts.  We dipped bolts in paint and rolled them back and forth in a box. 


We painted some large boxes so we can reenact the three little pigs story- we painted one house by using rubber bands attached to pencils dipped in paint to make it look like straw.; then we painted a another box with the edge of pieces of cardboard to look like sticks.  Our house of bricks was made by using sponges dipped in red paint to make it look like bricks.  

We will act out our Three little pigs story on Monday, March 5, 2012.

Some of the other activities we have done lately:
Letter activities, we use the dry erase boards to practice the letter of the week.  We also play games at group time where we guess which letter is missing, or we guess which number is missing. We did some rhyming and sorting game,  We made some marshmallow structures using marshmallows and toothpicks.  We made houses of straw (yellow yarn) , a house of sticks, and a house of bricks ( small red pieces of paper).