Hippo Headlines: St. Patrick's Day, Leprechauns, Spring!

Good day to you all, as the Irish would say! What a fun week we had learning about Ireland, changing our room into spring, and searching for our class leprechaun who kept moving every time we left the room!!! He was so quick and sneaky!

We began our week by talking about Ireland and St. Patrick's Day. The class looked at beautiful pictures of Ireland. We compared the Irish flag to our U.S. flag, showed a map of Ireland and talked about what an island is. We also looked at the globe and pointed out where we live and where Ireland is located. We decided we would have to fly to get there. Since Ireland has many castles with construction paper and kinetic sand with castle molds. We also made castles with the big blocks, then brought in the dollhouse people and the princesses. In addition we played with a wooden castle. Many of our activities centered around our St. Patrick's Day and spring theme. Activities included: patterning, counting and sorting coins, changing our tree on our bulletin board from winter to spring by making butterflies and kites, sequencing pictures, cutting, counting, painting, recognizing letters sounds, rhyming, practicing positional concepts with worms, recognizing numbers on our number hunt, recalling information from our stories, counting how many unifx cubes it took to get the leprechaun to his pot of gold, and journaling to name a few! Our sensory table contained pebbles, little black pots and gold coins. The students used tongs to put the gold coins into the black pots!

Our dramatic play area turned into a flower shop with order forms, flowers and garden gloves. During gym time we did St. Patrick's Day yoga and played red light/green light. The children pretended to be leprechauns, sneaking up behind me!

Our letter of the week was the letter W! We built it and thought of items that begin with the letter W. We also practiced recognizing our last names. We used them to vote on what we would do if we had a pot of gold. Would we spend it, save it, give it to someone else, or play with it!! We counted and compared the numbers! We also signed in to our favorite season. After reading a spring book and sequencing the steps in planting a flower, we used a flyswatter to swat at different numbers, letters and shapes named!

As we read The Wind Blew, we placed the objects the wind blew in a bag. After we read the story we recalled what objects blew away due to the wind. After that Ms. Ginny used a straw to blow different objects across the table. We learned that light objects go fast when blown and heavy objects go slower or don't move when blown.

After decorating a beautiful house for our leprechaun, we decided how to keep him in. Here are some of the ideas the hippos came up with:
*unicorn
*blocks
*animals
*tape
*cars
*dinosaurs

*rocks

We placed all of these items in front of his house Wednesday only to discover he escaped the next day! He is so sneaky and we don't know where he went! He did however, leave us clues to find a pot of gold. Each child took a gold coin home!

Books We Read:
How to Catch a Leprechaun
Clifford Spring Book
The Wind Blew

Spring

Let It Rain

Questions to Ask Your Child:
1. What did we use to keep our leprechaun in his house? Did he stay?
2. Why is Ireland so green? Does it rain often in Ireland? (yes)
3. What did the leprechaun give us? (gold coins)
4. What did the wind blow in our book, The Wind Blew? (scarf, letters, balloon, wig, flag, shirt, hat, umbrella, hat, letters, newspaper)
5. Our leprechaun took us on a hunt. Where did we find the pot of gold? (by the gym)

6. Are there snakes in Ireland? (no)

7. What has eyes but cannot see, a potato or a carrot? (a potato)

Things to do at home
Based on our book, The Wind Blew, take a straw and find some items in your house to see if they will move or not move when blowing them through a straw. Ask your child why some objects move while others do not.

Next Week: After we return from spring break we will learn about the desert

Reminders:

***Spring Beak, Monday 16-20

***No School-Professional Development Day, Tuesday April 7th

***Parent Teacher Conferences-Monday, April 13th and Wednesday, April 15th

Sign ups will come soon.

Below are the pictures of all the excitement we had this week! Thank you for your wonderful children!! We have so much fun with each and every one of them!!