Mrs. Rachel's Three's Class: Mittens, Hats, and Hedgehogs :)

We had a great first week back after Christmas break! Everyone was very excited to see their friends and get back to work. We spent this week learning through fun activities that went along with Jan Brett books. If you aren't familiar with this author, she has written a variety of fantastic children's books with wonderful illustrations (some of my favorites). The stories we focused on were The Mitten, The Hat, and The Umbrella.

To go along with the story The Mitten, we enjoyed doing a variety of "mitten" activities. We practiced our lacing skills by lacing mittens, practiced putting mittens in size order, counted how many animals we could fit inside our mittens, and even worked on our hand muscle strength by building with mittens on. We also reviewed letter M for mittens and introduced letter B. We were able to dot them with paint, sort picture cards for initial sounds, and even write them on our own!

We also enjoyed working on our painting skills this week by painting a hedgehog craft with forks! On Friday, we made a hat to go along with the book The Hat. One of our favorite activities of the week was making play dough hedgehogs using spaghetti noodles... Sometimes it is the simplest things!

You might have noticed that we started "signing in" this week. Everyone did very well with this! We continue to work on our marker/pencil grip, and this would be a great time for you to start emphasizing this at home by practicing name tracing with the name cards we gave you.

This week, see if your child can...

1. Tell you the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. (We did this to go along with our verse: "With God, all things are possible.")
2. Identify number 6 (this week's number).
3. Help you find three things in your house that start with the letter B.
4. Count to 20 with you.
5. Cut out the shape of a hat or mitten with scissors.