Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is one of my favorite times of year! I love all of the pinks and reds, and talking about love and friendship with my students.  Here are some of things we are doing this week:

Books:

There are lots of great books about love, friendship, and sharing.  Here are a few of my favorites.  I also added a couple of fantasy books because I think castles, fairies, and princesses go well with the Valentine's Day theme.  I got most of these books from the Goodwill, and all of the others I got from Target. 

Vocabulary Words:

I always like to buy actual objects that go with our vocabulary words!  I got cookie cutters in the shape of hearts, flower petals, candy hearts, and valentines.  I laminated the valentines so I can use them next year too.  I got all of these at the dollar store (besides the cookie cutters which was a gift).

Sensory Play:

This is the Frozen sensory bin, and I just added the Valentine's day vocabulary words to the bin.  It was great, because the students pretended to feed the characters some candy, give them valentines, etc. 

Sequencing 

We did a fun sequencing activity with Valentines!  I had visual cues of all of the steps the students would need to take in order to make a Valentine.  We also had all of the materials listed.  We worked on vocabulary words, following directions, and requesting with this activity!

Frozen

Many of my preschool students are obsessed with Frozen right now.  The best part is that both the girls and the boys are obsessed!  In my articulation class, we had a class dedicated to the movie Frozen, and we targeted the /z/ sound.  Here are a couple of things we did:

Book:

There is a great app called Frozen: Storybook Deluxe that we read in class.  It has great images, and short video clips.  It was a great tool to use for the students to answer questions, participate in story retell, and talk about their favorite parts of the movie.

Sensory Play:

We also created a sensory bin for our students to play.  I found the "recipe" somewhere on pinterest, and it is 8 parts flour and 1 part baby oil. We added some laminated photos of Frozen characters and some pretty blue rocks.  The photos were from a Frozen memory game, so we worked on finding matches and talking about "same" and "different."  This bin also just got the students to talk a lot in general!

Homework:

We sent the parents home with some Frozen coloring pages .  If you want some more suggestions, I found this great website that has all sorts of suggestions!

February Vocabulary Words

Here are our vocabulary words for the month. We are focusing on Valentine's Day/Friends, Arizona/the desert, and dental care/teeth!  

Arctic/Winter Theme

This past week we did everything Arctic and winter themed!  We had so much fun!  Here are some of the highlights:

Books:

 There are so many great books about arctic animals and winter time.  I had a few of my own books, and I got some more from the library.  My students really liked the non fiction books about all of the arctic animals.

At one point, my students got tired of looking at the books and wanted to play with blocks.  To make sure that we were still working on our vocabulary words, I had them pretend like the blocks were food and they helped feed all of the animals on the covers.  It's important to always follow the child's lead, and you may have to get creative!

Sensory Play: 

Arctic Sensory Bin

We had so much fun with our Arctic sensory bin! With this bin we worked on answering questions, learning new vocabulary words, following directions, and eliciting spontaneous language.

Contents:
Arctic animals (i.e. penguins, walrus, polar bears, artic foxes, arctic hare, etc.)
Large cooking utensils
Ice
Water
Anything you can find that is white and floats to look like an iceberg

Gross Motor Activity 

For our gross motor activity, we watched clips of Arctic animals on Youtube and then acted like them!  I put all of the videos on silent, and we talked about what the animals were doing and what they looked like.  The kids loved acting like them!  

Actions:

Polar Bear: Walked on four legs

Walrus: "Swam" on our stomachs

Hare: Hopped 

Penguin: Waddled

Seal: Rolled around on our stomachs and back 

*** Remember to put the videos on silent, and you may have to fast forward through some clips to see more of the animal actions!