Avalon Childcare and Preschool

Dutch Hollow Farms Dutch Hollow Farms

Review from last week, 12/12 - 12/16

Last week’s theme in our Outer Space unit was “stars and space station”.

🔤📚 For language and literacy, we continue our extended circle time conversations, review of alphabet phonics, and space themed books: How To Catch a Star, There Was a Blackhoke that Swallowed a Universe, The Sun is Kind of a Big Deal, Pete the Cat Goes to Space, and There’s No Place Like Space.

🎼👯 We have had music and movement with an emphasis on dance everyday during circle time.

🧮 For math, we practiced writing and completing worksheets: find, count, and write the number (as a group), Color-by-number, count and ID the number 1-10, and Space Bingo.

✨💫🛰 Our unit lesson activities were: constellation dot-to-dot and creating their own with glow-in-the-dark stars, asteroid ☄️ toss (foil spheres thrown at balloon “planets”), space sticker landscapes (reusable and one to go home), and space station science experiments. We had jelly slime and clay slime with different colors and textures that we measured, weighed, and described.

🤩 Videos and other pics of daily moments are on the private FB group.

Review of week of 12/5 - 12/9

This week’s topic within our Outer Space 🪐 unit was “Planets and Rockets”!

🔤 📚 For language and literacy, we have been reviewing our phonics alphabet cards, having extra time for Circle Time conversation, and reading our space themed books: 8 Little Planets, Mousetronaut, Mousetronaut Goes to Mars, Rocket Bye Baby, and Goodnight Solar System.

🎼👯 During Circle Time, everyday we have music and movement with an emphasis on dance. (See our private FB group for videos.)

🧮 Math activities this week has been writing and worksheet practice with: number line, counting with number ID, line tracing, coloring planets, and 1-10 number tracing.

🚀🪐 For our learning unit activities, we played catch with giant inflatable planets while learning their names, painting 3D spheres for planet design, playing in our homemade ride-in rocket with astronaut gear, using shapes for name rockets, and having extended free play with our space themed toys.

Pics and recap of activities from last week, Mon 11/28 - Fri 12/2.

We began our Outer Space unit last week! We have a large toy rocket 🚀, space themed projector 📽 and viewfinder, and a sensory tray for a lunar expedition (in flour) that is set out for self-directed play and was absolutely in demand the entire time!!!!

🔤 For language and literacy, we are reading space themed books each day and working on memorization of letter sounds through flash cards.

🎼 👯 Circle Time activities during our unit are all music and movement—with an emphasis on dance. I will post those videos on our private family group.

🧮 Our math activities this week were: same/different, completing more complex patterns, color-by-shape, mazes, and star counting 1-9.

🧑‍🚀☀️🌚🌎 within our outer space unit, this week’s theme was sun, Earth, and moon. We explored the concept of proximity to the sun’s heat through a hot or cold hide-and-seek game with a yellow balloon “sun”, played a game of musical chairs as we learned how the planets revolve around the sun, learned about Earth’s composition by doing a 3-D model out of Play-Doh, talked about the movement of the moon and practiced how it looks by matching and making different amounts of Oreo cookie filling on our moon face sheet, and exported the moon surface through a sensory tray filled with flour, stars, planets, and astronauts with their gear.

🤩. Favorite free time activities shifted to riding bikes outside and building with different materials inside.


Activities for the second week of November (Mon 11/7 - Fri 11/11). We continue our learning unit about trees, this week exploring parts of a tree and habitats.

(We had a tiny group this week)

🤩 Free play favorites: the rain 🌧 turned our sandbox into a beach-perfect texture for building sand castles, so they have enjoyed that daily! I also repositioned the play house and mud kitchens and they enjoyed that more open area! The modular tubes and other building toys were also favorites (along with the inside play kitchen).

📚✍️ Language and literacy was combined with math 🧮—this past week and next— with our nature journals 📓 building our first word wall and doing scavenger hunts for the nature items in the journal.

🗣📖 For Circle Time this month, we are practicing oral storytelling and describing pictures from nature books. This weeks’ books were from National Geographic (a mix of kids and adult): Storms, My First Big Book of the Rainforest, Creatures of the Desert, and In the Forest.

🎶 We have 10 minutes daily, before and at the beginning of snack, for music—singing along and movements from our Simple Songs playlist. I normally don’t note this because we do it everyday as part of our routine.

🌴🌲🌵 The unit lessons this week were based on practicing observation, investigation/inquiry, and “documentation”. Basically, children are practicing how to explore different forms of investigating topics (in this case trees), how to communicate what they find either verbally or by writing or drawing it, and connecting their knowledge of nature to everyday life.

❤️Mon- was about tree trunks. The differences of texture/color/size and documentation doing tree trunk rubbings and tree ring circles showing size/age/-using their own age (if they were a tree).

🧡Tue- was about identifying groups of similar leaves and then coloring the same leaves the same color. We also are working a lot on words as labels. While I have words written down on their work, it is not expected for them to be able to read the word, but rather for them to understand that that word represents the name of the item.

💛Wed- The jungle habitat. There is an amazing, 20 minute long cartoon episode from The Magic School Bus about the rainforest. The class investigates why their teacher’s cacao tree isn’t producing. We watch-pause-discuss during the episode to make it interactive. They were fascinated that the cacao tree is what produces chocolate 🍫!

💚Thu/ The desert habitat. This actually stole the show for the whole week because of the type of book we had. It was a pop-up book that also had little tabs that you could pull to make movements. It was creatures of the desert by National Geographic. After they each got a turn to pull the tabs, we had a drawing of a desert landscape with creatures and I went through our book again so they could color the creatures on their page that were also in the book. Then they circled the word that was next to the creature as they continue to practice seeing words as meaningful labels for things.

💙Fri- The Forest. We had a touch and feel book for in the forest, along with a picture of a forest and animals that we used to compare to the plants and animals within our story book. We circled the similar items. We also did the singing and movements to the song 🎵 walking through the forest.

Activities for Monday, October 31st through Friday, November 4th.

This week (after the festivities, we began the “Our Giving Trees” learning unit that explores all about trees.

🎃Monday was Halloween, so we had inside and outside trick-or-treat scavenger hunts in costume. Later we had more bubbling cauldron since that was a favorite from last week. We also had extended free play.

💀 Tuesday was Dia de los Mu***os. We had coloring of calaveras and extended free play.

For Wednesday through Friday, we began our learning unit on trees.

🔤 For literacy and language, we are beginning to explore words as labels, and also practice our spacing and size of writing letters.

📖 Circle Time all of this month will be dedicated to oral storytelling. So last week we practiced very specific group sharing on things we have done with prompts of setting and who was there and what they did.

🧮 For math, we finished up our pumpkin calendar on Monday and put up our turkey calendar for November, counting the turkeys and also identifying the number for the holidays and special events this month.

🌳 Wednesday we studied the lifecycle of a tree, doing a sequence puzzle and practicing vocabulary for acorn, sapling, tree, and log.
🌳 Thursday was the seasonal lifecycle of a tree. We completed a more challenging activity of designing a tree template for the four different seasons. We had puffy blossom stickers for spring, multicolored tissue paper for autumn, green paint for summer, and cotton balls with glitter for winter.
🌳 Friday what is learning about different tree parts, specifically roots. We did this by planting (partially anyways) a fig tree. They got to touch and explore the roots and parts of the tree. Prepping the ground by digging a hole that would be the right size for the root ball was a lot of work! They seemed to really enjoy it and especially enjoyed finding earthworms!!!!

Activities for week of Mon., October 24 through Fri., October 28th. This was Halloween 🎃 week!

Monday was Diwali 🪔. We colored mandalas and did chalk Rangoli art outside.

Tuesday we had a sensory activity with a large cauldron filled with water beads and Halloween toys. They took turns closing their eyes, reaching in, and pulling up toys until they filled up their own mini cauldrons. 📖 Our story was Room on the Broom. Then they got to make a bubbling cauldron with glitter, baking soda, and dyed vinegar! 🧙‍♀️

Wednesday they practiced cutting skills by cutting and pasting bones to form a cute skeleton. ☠️ Our story 📖 was How to Make Friend with a Ghost. 👻 After, we painted ghost rocks (though our glow in the dark paint wasn’t working as anticipated).

Thursday we colored haunted houses. 🏚 Our story 📖 was The Gruffalo. We then designed our own monsters with coloring and sticker art, which we then put in a haunted house silhouette. They turned out SO cute, and the kids loved opening the windows and door!

Friday we read 📖 Zombies Don’t Eat Veggies. We then defrosted frozen zombie hands filled with “creepy” toys like eye ball ping pong balls, witch fingers, and toy spiders! Then we had extended free play.

🎥Videos are on the private Facebook group.

Octobers learning unit, Harvest Garden and Animals. Week three‘s theme of nocturnal animals, Monday, October 17 through Friday, October 21.

🤩 Favorite free time activities continue to be coloring, Legos, playing with the stuffed animals and dramatic play inside, and a new outside game of “egg” (they curl up and pretend to be an egg and then pop up and run around for tag and then somebody else does it.) 😋😅

🔤 🖍✂️ For Literacy and Language, we are continuing to work on complex boundary line drawing. We had coloring sheets for bats, owls, raccoons, wolfs, and mouse mazes. We also had scissors out for cutting practice with paint chip cards. Later on during the week, we incorporated paper with pictures to cut out.

📚 Circle Time books this week were: Stellaluna, Owl at Night, Opossum Opposites, Touch and Explore Animals at Night, and Flashlight. For all of these we continue to work on concepts about print and comprehension of the text. Except for our a Opossum Opposites book, where they practiced playing a possum and I was the owl in a freeze dance adaptation. I posted the video in our private group.

🧮 Math activities for this week: a bat counting and numbering sheet from 1 to 5, calendar counting, and our insect cards—counting and number identification.

🦇🦉🦝🐀🐺 Our learning theme this week was nocturnal animals.  The learning objectives are scientific inquiry and documentation, so we labeled bat anatomy, did a story time and tracing out food web for owls, played a game with our stuffed raccoon for camouflage, and made art for showing snail anatomy while we talked about all animals who eat snails 🐌 (even people!!!). Friday was a review of all of our nocturnal animals and extra free play.

October’s Harvest Garden and Animals unit. Week two’s theme was “insects and reptiles”; Monday, October 10 through Friday, October 14.

🤩 Favorite free time activities this week were coloring, books, puppets, and Legos! 

🔤🖍 We combined art into the literacy and language center so they can practice their fine motor skills. We worked with coloring pages of complex boundary lines with crayons, markers, pencils, oil pastels, and paint.

📚 Our Circle Time books this week were The Life and Times of the Ant, The Backyard Bug Book, The Very Lonely Firefly, The Book of Brilliant Bugs, and National Geographic Little Kids First Bug Book. 

🧮 Math activities this week were using the insect counting cards on our art wall. Each day we had practice with counting and selecting the appropriate number for the quantity.

🐜🕷🦎🐍 This weeks theme of insects and reptiles focused on the home, food, and behavior— plus how they all relate to each other. We worked with ant mazes, made paper plates spiders, painted a Luna moth and used pasta for representing its lifecycle, did a scavenger hunt for lizards and homes, and used art to represent snake skin and patterns on snakes.

Highlights from last week, Monday, October 3 through Friday, October 7:

🤩 Favorite free time activities were coloring, playing with the pumpkins, the mud kitchens outside, blocks, and dramatic play games such as pretending to be trains or families
Going about daily tasks.

We began a new learning unit this month called Harvest Garden and Animals. This week we focused on different autumn garden veggies/flowers—especially pumpkins!

🔤🎨Our literacy and language is combined with art this week. Each day we had a new coloring page with complex boundary lines for them to practice. We colored pumpkins, corn, sunflowers, and mushrooms. They used glitter pens, metallic pens, gel crayons, and crayons.

📚 For our Circle Time stories, we read and discussed: Pumpkin Fiesta, Strega Nona’s Harvest, Too Many Pumpkins, and the story of the Three Sisters: Corn, Beans, and Squash.

🎶 Every day we have listened to our music playlist and sing along during snack time. On Wednesday we also did the Five Little Pumpkins counting song.

🧮 Our math activities were doing measurement comparisons with five pumpkins, including weight and height, the Five Little Pumpkins counting song, geometric foam shapes to fit within our pumpkin art, and a color by number Jack O’Lantern pumpkin.

🎃 our unit lessons were all based around pumpkins through art and cooking. On Monday we made clay pinch pot pumpkins, on Tuesday we made pumpkin juice, on Wednesday we decorated real mini pumpkins with paint and glitter and finished painting our clay pumpkins, on Thursday we baked pumpkin bread, and on Friday we practiced our cutting and gluing skills with paper strips pumpkins!

Highlights from last week, 9/24 - 9/28

🤩 favorite free time activities were kinetic sand, Play-Doh, different dramatic play games, and riding the bikes.

🧮 This was our last week of a one on one math activities during circle time in the morning. We worked with shapes in the classroom doing a treasure hunt, identifying numbers one through 10, patterning on clothing, and sorting from smallest to largest.

🔤📖 We finished our alphabet books with letters W through Z this week. Then we spent Wednesday through Friday with a final writing activity doing upper and lowercase letters — next to pictures from the different alphabet books we read throughout the month. I did this one on one or in partners. Each of them loved seen the collection of all of the work they did throughout the month. I think they were surprised at how much they did! I was in such a rush to finish them up on Friday that I didn’t get a chance to take a video of a finished one unfortunately, but I hope you all enjoy them as much as I did making them!

Last week’s review (9/19 - 9/23)

🤩 Favorite free time activities were magna tiles, Legos, drawing, playing with the dolls and stuffed animals, and the cars outside.

🔠🔢 This was week three of our unit for the month of ABC’s and 123s. We are practicing our phonics, writing, and letters and having one-on-one math games.

🔤 📖 for our language and literacy, we focused on letter identification and phonics for the letters O-V. Our alphabet books were: Mrs. Peanuckle’s Fruit Alphabet, Mrs. Peanucke’s Burd Alphabet, Mrs. Peanuckle’s Vegetable Alphabet, C is for Camping, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. They have been putting all of their work in the alphabet book they are creating.

🧮 For our math activities last week, we worked on tracing and coloring different shapes - then comparing sizes, working with the Montessori math number line (figuring out missing numbers), completing patterns with letters, playing the counting bears dice game, and sorting items by weight (light versus heavy). Videos are on our private Facebook group.

🔐🎥📸 videos and photos are on the private family Facebook group for Avalon.