At school, we had a surprise visit by a Carolina Wren, she’s sitting on the fence post.

She built a nest in the flower box, right outside our classroom window, and laid four eggs.

The toddlers love checking on her and doing bird related activities.

We color matched eggs.

And painted with feathers.

Today in Early 3’s we talked about butterflies and how they emerge from their chrysalis. The children were very interested in the topic, and I showed them a video of a Monarch butterfly emerging.

Here is a link to the video we watched: http://youtu.be/R5QH3bGF4uU 

We painted butterflies….

Keeping the “insect” theme, we worked on our cutting skills by cutting “grass” to “hide” the bugs on the page.

During group time, we demonstrated how a butterfly needs to struggle as it comes out of its cocoon. We talked about the importance of not helping a butterfly, even if we think it is struggling.

During the month of April, we’ve been learning about bugs and where they live.  So, today we made our own edible dirt for our edible bugs.

We started with two packages of french vanilla instant pudding.

Next we added 3 cups of milk,

butter,

and cream cheese.

Then we mixed it all together.

And saved the best part for last, we crushed Oreo’s!

Then we layered it, and added some Creepy Crawlers fruit snacks for bugs.

This week the toddlers feed our wide mouth frog.

First the toddlers rolled a die, counted the dots, then picked out that number of bugs and feed them to the our wide mouth friend.

The Cincinnati Zoo came to our classroom today and brought two amazing animals to share with us.  The K prep students who attended all day were able to see two DIFFERENT animals in the morning with the Preschool Class…it was such a fun experience!  This afternoon we met Ghana the Hedgehog from Africa and a red footed tortoise from South America.

We have been working hard this month on our addition math study unit…we have used many different manipulatives such as marbles and unifix cubes to learned the fundamentals of addition.  According to learning theory based on psychologist Jean Piaget’s research, children are active learners who master math concepts by progressing through three levels of knowledge–concrete, pictorial, and abstract. When children use manipulatives it allows them to explore addition at the concrete level. When students manipulate objects to solve addition problems, they are taking the first steps toward building understanding and internalizing math processes and procedures.  They will then use the base knowledge to develop more sophisticated problem-solving strategies in the future.

What color is the Recycling Bin?

We have been working on learning to read the color words during the month of April and it continues this week…earth day style!  What Color is YOUR recycle bin?