M is for Monday and Mittens

At calendar today we discovered that Monday begins with M just like our craft for the day, Mittens!  As the students came in this morning, they were hard at work cutting tissue paper to use for our stained glass mittens.

After morning work, the students enjoyed some free play time on the carpet building structures with our wooden blocks.  The wooden blocks are probably the most used and favorite objects in our classroom.  Every morning, as soon as the students finish their morning work, they pull out all of the blocks and set to work creating structures to use with the princesses, the superheroes, cars; the possibilities are endless.  It is neat to watch this imaginative play and the cooperation and problem solving that it fosters among the students.

After free play and calendar we got busy with our three centers for the day.  Our centers today included making stained glass mittens, ice fishing, and bead stringing.

At the stained glass mitten center, the students placed the tissue paper they cut for morning work on a piece of contact paper shaped like a mitten.  Some of the students meticulously placed each piece of tissue paper on the mitten, while other students sprinkled a handful of tissue paper onto their mittens. 

The ice fishing center is one of the students' favorites.  At this center they took turns catching letter "fish" in the ice pond with a magnetic fishing pole.  They had to identify each letter they caught and they did fabulous!

The bead stringing center provided the students with an opportunity to work on their fine motor skills,  patterning skills, and sorting skills.  

After centers and before we ate snack, we read the book, The Mitten, by Jan Brett.  The students are excited about completing activities related to this book tomorrow!  Before snack, we also took the opportunity to work on number recognition.  The students took turns untracing numbers on the dry erase board.  We have more number recognition activities planned for tomorrow!