Dot Day and Name Adventures!

This week the children made preparations for "International Dot Day" for Thursday!  We did a lot of color work preparations with talking about different colors, how to take care of painting supplies and ensuring true clear colors by washing paint brushes and drying them on paper toweling before choosing a new color.  Within the discoveries of care, the children can discover differences through mixing colors.  We painted our "Dot Day" water color paintings on small paper and framed them for our bulletin board.  We discovered that within small paper, we can still paint big and little dots.  We counted our dots and saw how many of each color we painted.  On Tuesday and Wednesday we painted our Dot Day t-shirts.  The children have lots of variety and helped each other in creating dots on their t-shirts.  I saw some really nice teamwork happening!  On Thursday, we had our Dot Day Celebrations in class with our T-shirt parade, dot face painting and dot day show and tell.  This is the children's first show and tell.  They demonstrated very good listening to each other.  In our class,
Listening has three steps that is posted on a visual chart for the children as a reminder.  The steps are:
1.  Look.
2.  Stay still.
3.  Think.
(Skillstreaming in Early Childhood, by Ellen McGinnis and Arnold P. Goldstein)
We are working very hard with patience, knowing that by raising our hand, we will get a turn to talk to ask a question to our show and tell participant.  Great job!

We explored one of my favorite alphabet books, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom this week.  We did it as a read-a-loud one day, and then as a group chant the next day.  The children then placed their name coconuts on the coconut tree as we read the chant together and worked on name recognition.  We are learning that letters make words.  That words tell us something.  That reading and printing starts from left to right.  Reading is fun!  With cube links, we created our names again this week and discovered who has the shortest name; who has the longest name; who have names the same size.  Interesting discoveries.  With cube links we also made the letter of our first name.  Our letters do not all have the same shape.  Interesting.
We are creating our first book.  It is a recipe book.  Based on last week's interests, we cooked pancakes...and since I did not have blueberries this week, the children thought chocolate chips would do.  The children shared their thoughts about the properties of chocolate chips and heat....and they were right....they melt.  Yummy! 
We made red playdough, but  we decided not to make purple yet.  The children are not exactly sure what colors mixed together make purple.  Next week, we will have colored water for them to experiment the properties of color.  I wonder what we will discover!