Happy Holidays!

Everyone at Little Wonders wishes all of our friends and family Happy Holidays!

Thank you to all of the parents and friends of our parents for making our Winter Festival a huge success!

We should have a slide show of the pictures soon!

Just as a reminder, Little Wonders will be closed Friday, December 24th, Monday the 27th, and Friday the 31st.  We are looking forward to a wonderful new year!

Little Wonders International Festival

"A snowflake from the North Pole"
by Kaelynn

Our International Festival will begin at 3:00 p.m.,

Friday, December 17th! 

All family and friends are welcome to join the festivities!

To kick off the Festival, the children of Little Wonders will perform holiday songs! 
Toddler 1 through PreK classes will all be part of the performance!  This is a show you do not want to miss!  Please dress your child in the colors red, white, green or black. 

10,000 pounds of snow have been ordered from the North Pole! 

Please bring gloves, snow boots, extra pants, socks, a shirt, and shoes for your child.  For more information on the snow party and their rules click on the following link.......

http://www.iceexpress.com/snow_parties.html

Our snow fund raiser is going on every morning in the hallway.  Breakfast and ornaments have been provided by the children and parents to help raise money to cover the cost of the snow.

Our goal is to raise $700, and we have raised $186 so far.

Thank you to all of the parents who have donated money and breakfast goodies!

The International Festival is a great way for us to try new foods, and learn about tastes from around the world. 

Please sign up to bring a dish that represents the nationality of your family!

Sign-ups are available by your classrooms to bring in your favorite international holiday dish!

YUM!

Little Wonders in 002 Houston Magazine

We are so excited about our school being covered in the latest issue of Houston's 002 Magazine!
Here is the link to see the article on line.......

http://002mag.com/wordpress/2010/12/02/little-wonders-learning-center-december-2010/

Parents, find your copies of the magazine around town and make it a keep sake for when our little ones get older! ;0)

LITTLE WONDERS LEARNING CENTER December 2010

Hanukkah

Someone made the comment that this was a vase with flowers, but it is in fact a menorah! 

This is the first year that Little Wonders has a child who celebrates Hanukkah (as well as Christmas)!  We are so excited, and we are learning so much from him!  We have been reading books about Hanukkah, and learning about the traditions.

We read and leaned about the menorah and that Hanukkah has 8 nights.  They get a present every night for 8 nights, but the children who celebrate Christmas get a lot of presents for one night.  Hanukkah is a celebration of lights, in fact, it is called the festival of lights because of the "oil lasting for 8 nights instead of one"!

We also read that latkes are a traditional food in the Hanukkah celebration, so we got a recipe and made them ourselves!

Some of our older children sounded out and read our ingredients for us.......

Once we had all of the ingredients, we all gathered around Ms.Ambreen to learn how to peel and shred a potato.

We could do it all by ourselves! ;0)

But wait!!!!  A major math problem occurred!  Mateo was documenting the stages of our cooking.  He drew the latkes and drew little circles inside to represent the eggs.  Wow, he drew a lot of eggs!  Trevor said, "that is a lot of eggs, we only need 3 eggs"!

So, we counted Mateo's eggs, and he counted 25.  Now, how do you write twenty five??????

We heard different combinations of numbers, but Carter said, "a two and a five!"

So, it was time for us to practice writing 2's and 5's!

Ahhhh, ok, now that the math work was done, we could get back to cooking! ;)

We were so lucky to have Sam's parents join us on this day to tell us about the Hanukkah tradition and help us cook the latkes..........

They made sure everything came out ok!

And boy did it ever come out okay!  They were a hit!  The children LOVED them!  We ate them with applesauce and sour cream.......

MMMMMmmmmmmmmmm.......

While we ate, Sam's dad read us a book about Hanukkah.

When he was done reading, we went by the door to watch him light the menorah. (we made sure to do it by the door so that the smoke alarm wouldn't go off ;0)  )

We were all so interested!

We watched as he used the one in the middle (green) to light the rest of the candles.  It was the third night of Hanukkah, so we lit three candles.

Here is one picture of Mark's menorah after our day of learning about Hanukkah!  The children got so much from their experiences today. 

It was great to have Sam's family with us to share their traditions.  It is really adding to our knowledge of how different parts of the world experience the holidays during winter.  We would love to learn about our other children's traditions, please feel free to send materials, pictures, books, etc with your child before the festival.

Please feel free to talk to Maryam if you have questions or ideas!

Art Exhibit

Parents!

Please make time to view the amazing art exhibit in the entry way of the building!  The exhibit will be on display from December 6th through the 15th. 

The opening reception is tonight beginning at 4:00 p.m.  All friends and family are welcome! 

 There will also be open registration tonight for the next series of classes.  Marjon is now offering an additional class on clay!  All the information on classes will be provided at the show!

See you there!

Counting A Snake

The children started pulling out the duct tape and making it longer, and longer.  We asked what they were doing, and they said, "We are making a snake!"

This was a great opportunity to encourage problem solving!  We began looking through all of our cubbies in our class and touching the different materials.  We asked, "What other things does the snake need?  "What else do we need to make the snake?"

They pulled out little tile samples, and began sticking them on the tape.  Each child was shouting out what color they found as they stuck them on.  We have been talking about classifying and sorting objects by different attributes (color, shape, size, number of sides, etc.)  We began doing the same thing as we put our tiles on the tape.

When we filled up the entire piece of tape, we had so much fun pretending the snake was chasing us!  "Be careful, don't let it bite you!"

We put eyes and a "long tongue" on our snakes!

Please take extra caution when you are walking on our side of the building ;0)  The "mommy snake" and her "babies" are crawling up the walls for everyone to see!

Pretend play is essential to our toddlers' learning and development. We encourage the children to use the materials in the classroom to help them engage in pretend play. It is helping them develop language skills, and create a rich imagination.

The Texas Snowman!

So who says you can't build a snowman in 80 degree weather?????

The genius children here at little wonders came up with the idea of freezing water balloons!  We made "a small, large, and big" size water balloon.

We peeled the balloon off, and we were left with 3 balls of ice!

We read in a book that salt would help make the ice stick together.  Many children tried to hold the ice, but they started crying once the ice got their hands cold, so Bishop and Luke took the initiative to pour the ice and hold the balls of ice in place!

Okay, two balls in place, now for the third.........

The ice wasn't really sticking well together, so Alexandre said, "I know!! We can use glue!" ;0)

hmmmmm........ lets see if the glue works.........

We weren't so lucky with the glue, so Bishop poured more salt, aka "sauce"!

Luke was a master at holding the ice!  The cold didn't phase him at all!!!!

But what a tragedy......our snowman crashed with all the glue and salt we poured on it!  Of course our children didn't give up!  We stacked the ice right back on top of each other.

Now the snowman needed eyes, so the children tried to DRAW the eyes and buttons on with a marker!

That didn't work, so Alexandre drew some, cut them and tried to stick them on.

The children grabbed q-tips for the hands and feet!

Some of us were so excited that they wanted to draw some snowmen.

While, the others tried and tried to keep our snowman together, he kept melting away and breaking :0(   We took the snowman outside and watched him melt away in our "hot temperature" (Ashley reminded everyone why ice melts)

But fear not!!!  This is not the end of our quest to make a snowman in "warm temperatures"!  We will keep you updated on how our experimentation goes!