China, friends and hearing!

Today we did friendship paintings. I introduced "Allie" a new puppet with the social and emotional development program I am using right now. We also had a friend with the Al's Pals program come to visit today- Mrs. Angie. The children were paired up and asked to work together to paint a picture. It was interesting to listen to them talking about it. One of the pairs of friends even drew a line down the middle so they would each have their own space.

There were a LOT of things going on today. Another thing we did today was introduce the 5 senses . Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.. Today we focused on hearing. We played a game with our instruments . We had two trays with " Loud" and " Soft" written on a card. Each child played an instrument and we talked about whether it had a loud sound or a soft sound. Then we discussed what loud noises we might hear outside and what soft noises. We even took it a step further and counted how many were on each tray and which tray had more or less instruments.

For lunch today we had homemade potato soup and ham. The kids loved it after coming inside from playing outside and they were " oh so cold" or thought " my fingers are falling off."

Above you can see our new toys we put out today for the 5 senses. There is a texture board with different surfaces for the children to try out. This also gives us time to expand out language as we talk about them being " rough, smoothe, hard or scratchy! "

Another fun thing we did today was turn our dramatic play into CHINA! The chinese New Years is February 14th. More about this later...