Spring is Here...

We try to change out my classroom door each month but when Spring rolls around and it is close to the end of the year, we try to find one that can last a while!  We decided to do a cute tree with birds and the wording, "Tweeting About God's Love".

All About Our Teeth

Of course, we learn all about Dental Health during February.  Again, I really like this unit!  I like teaching this and doing fun crafts.  We have these huge teeth models at school with a gigantic toothbrush that we use to teach the children the right way to brush their teeth.  They each get a turn brushing the big teeth!  We also talk about what foods are healthy and unhealthy for our teeth and use a fun activity on the felt board.

One of the children's most fun activities is making a model of their mouths using play-doh and beans.  I typed up a half sheet of paper that says, "How Many Baby Teeth Do I Have?  I Have 20 Baby Teeth... 10 on top and 10 on bottom."  They use light pink play-doh to roll out two sets of mouths/gums and we use hot glue to keep them on the paper (teachers do this part!)  Then the children get ten white beans for the top and ten for the bottom and add their teeth.  The play-doh hardens up overnight.

 A fun activity I found on TPT was a precious tooth and toothbrush with faces and all dressed up from A Cupcake for a Teacher.  We used this activity for the girls to dress up the teeth and the boys to dress up the toothbrushes.  Through the same purchase, she had a precious tooth brushing chart that I laminated, adding a ribbon to hang and gave an Expo marker for a reusable chart in their bathrooms.  The package includes a few other activities including some writing prompts.  Here is a link to the activity/craft on TPT: www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/sweet-tooth-dental-health

To end the week, my aide and myself gave each child a special toothbrush to take home with them!

A find a bunch of my dental health printables, games, activities and felt boards on www.kidssoup.com which you do have to be a member of!

Fruits, Veggies, Nutrition, Oh My!

I love teaching and talking about nutrition, fruits and veggies!  I enjoy teaching the kids all about the 5 food groups, the food plate, eating the rainbow and more.  They learn all about what foods are good for you and which foods are not and we do some fun exercises to energetic kid friendly music!  I have a few books I always read during this week including Lunch and The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza.  We also do a cute craft to go with each of them.  

As I said earlier, we always read the book Lunch by Denise Fleming.  The book is all about a mouse who eats all these healthy fruits and vegetables and gets a full tummy.  Along the way, he also gets the food all over him.  The kids get to make a cute mouse craft and they use q-tips to add all the different colors of fruits and veggies on the mouse's body!

Another book we read was The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) retold by Philemon Sturges.  I love this book and we talk all about pizza and the veggies you can put on your pizza.  The children make a pizza glyph to go along with the book.  FYI... I love glyphs!

We also always talk about how you should eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables.  What craft could be more fun than to make a rainbow with colorful fruits and veggies all over it!?  For this craft, I had clip art of fruits and veggies that I printed out for each color.  We gave the children thin, small pieces of construction paper to make their rainbow and we did one color at a time.  When they were all through making a rainbow, they added their fruits and vegetables to it.  I typed up and printed the words for fruit, veggies and Eating a Rainbow and the children glued them on their craft.

Of course, all the children in my class are precious in my eyes so they all deserved to be kings and queens for a day!  So, we made fruit and veggie crowns.  I am a member of the site www.kidssoup.com and I use the templates from this site for this craft.

One more craft we do is is making our own plate modeled after the one for Choose My Plate.  The children use a paper plate and glue down cut out sections to make the plate.  They then glue on the coordinating foods for each of the food groups.  You can get some printable materials to use with your class at www.choosemyplate.gov/food-groups and another great site to get printables and teaching material from is www.nourishinteractive.com/nutrition-education

And lastly for crafts, this is just a quick and easy one to take up some extra time in class.  The kids get to make a vegetable garden.  I typed up and used clip art to make garden stakes with veggie names and the children can either glue wads of tissue paper or this year, we just cut foam squares with sticky on the back and let them place them down.

And last, I would like to share a great coloring/following directions worksheet I found while searching the internet.  You can find it here: www.camdenchildrensgarden.org/

Muffins for Moms

We love our Mommies and at our school, we host a Muffins for Mom morning each year.  We do ours around Valentine's Day each year.  I spend a couple of months before the big day racking my brain for the perfect centerpieces and table decorations for my three tables for my class.  Each teacher decorates her own tables in the way she wants to.  The children make placemats for their Mommy's seat and then we make a bunch of special gifts and treats.  This year, we made two keepsake gifts... tea towels with a poem and their handprints printed on transfer paper and then ironed on and also we did the picture frames with 3 different pics - one with the child holding M, then O and then M again to spell out MOM in three different pics.  I love getting prepared for Muffins for Mom and the kids get so excited to make gifts for their mommies!

My table decorations were my most time consuming to prepare than any other year.  I am a very crafty person so I thought I would go to the extreme on my centerpieces...Sweetheart topiaries!  They turned out great but wow, the time I spent on them - 2 hours per topiary and I made three of them.  I also made 24 small ones for place cards for the children and their moms.  Thank goodness for Dollar Store sweethearts because I used many bags!

The placemats the children made were precious.  I saw the idea on Pinterest - what a shock!  I always do something with handprints (I am a handprint crazy woman!)  The children made a flower with their hands from red and pink paint, we added green stems and grass and a few additional heart flowers from their thumbprints.  I cut the words Mommy, Love and 2013 on my Cricut from vinyl and added it to the placemat.  We are a church preschool, so what better way to show Love than by a beautiful Bible verse about Love.

We made a few other cute little things for our Mommies including a card, a bouquet of flowers and a portrait of each Mommy with questions about her answered by each child.

Of course, we have our gifts.  Somehow, I messed up and wrapped the frames before I took the pictures so I do not have that to share.  Here is our towels...

And lastly... a pic of me and my sweet girl sitting with her class at Muffins for Mom.