My Birthday is on the Calender!

The children had a very interesting discussion on birthdays!

The children were looking at the calender in the class room when one of them said, "My birthday is on the calender." Ella responded by saying, "My birthday is last week!"

This started a discussion on who was three years old and who was two years old.

 Alex told Ms.Kia she was two but wanted to know when she was turning three.

We thought this would be a great opportunity to set up a calender in the classroom to help the children continue this project. Everyday we have been using the calendar to follow the day of the week, month and name of the month.

Everyday we look at the number of the day...

 count each day...

read the month and day of the week...

look at the numbers in our year...

and look to see who's birthday will be next!

Since we are trying to read everyday of the week along with the month, we thought it would be a great idea to practice writing all the days and add it to our calender!

We are also writing our names too, to help with this project!  

We are excited about this project and would like to invite our parents to be involved in any possible way. We encourage you to share your ideas and materials that  you think might help the children learn these concepts!

Making A House for our Class

One morning we observed Johnathan, Alex, Raina, Devyn and Jack playing in the block area. We asked what the they were making, they replied, "A house!" They created all of the houses out of white triangles and colored blocks!

Than they thought it would be a great idea to create a REAL house of their own for their classroom!

We supplied them with one brown box.....

At first, they colored their houses with markers, because they said the houses needed to be different colors.

After a while of using markers and trying to color the box, they realized it just wasn't looking the way they had hoped...So we walked around the room to see if their was something else that could be used to make the box a different color....

Sooo.....we found our jugs of paint! We thought this would be just right..... :)

After painting the parts we could...we moved on to adding details..

but first we talked about what we would need to put on to make this house:

The children told me that houses have windows and doors.

Jack said the roof should be white because his roof at his house is white...

We used tissue paper as the roof.

We also made windows and doors that we painted on...

We counted four windows and 6 doors.

As the children were decorating the house they told me a couple of fun facts about their house!

Alex told us , " Mom lives in the house and she is grabbing presents for my birthday."

Natalia told us she plays in the house.

The children continued to talk about the houses, what they do in them, and who lives in them.  It was a great day of conversation, creativity and fun!

Measuring!

The girls noticed some rulers in the classroom one day! They started playing with them, and they were so excited to use them!

After a little bit of experimentation with these objects we had a conversation about what rulers are used for...

We talked about how rulers could be used for a couple of different things:

1. To measure objects

2. To help you draw straight lines.

We asked what they would like to use their ruler for first, and they said to make straight lines..

They were very determined to make as many straight lines as possible! You can see the deep concentration..... ;-D

After doing that they moved on to measuring things in the classroom, but before we began, we looked at all the numbers on the ruler and counted from 1 to 12, so we knew with what number it began, and with what number it stopped.

The girls ran to begin measuring many different things! They loved doing this! They would even guess what they thought the measurement would be, before actually checking it!

Door-"39 Ft".

Trash can- "4 cm".

Table- "1 cm"

Now every time they pick up a ruler they start measuring the first thing in sight!

This is a very great opportunity for the children to practice measuring, learning their numbers and making straight lines.

Here are a few pictures that the girls created with this project...

By: Mila

By: Natalia

By: Ella

By: Devyn

This project has created so much excitement around measuring, math, and writing our numbers.  Feel free to ask the teachers about greater details of what the children have worked on.