It's not very often around here that we play with something that leaves the area cleaner than when we started!
Today we learned and experimented with bubbles!  I got out a few bowls of soapy water and some straws with holes poked near the top (to help prevent the soap from going all the way UP the straw and into mouths!), and we got to work blowing bubbles.  We learned that you have to blow soft and slow to make BIG bubbles, 
...and blow fast and hard to make LOTS of little bubbles.
We learned that if your hand is dry, it will pop your bubbles (aka, breaking the surface tension), but if it is wet, you can put it (and just about anything else!) INSIDE your bubbles!  
And since the letter list that we're working on right now is the letter B, we got out our Bugs to Blow Bubbles around and came up with lots of relevant words to add to our list today!
 
 
Picture
     We worked together on a group project today that helped the kids review their numbers and gave a fun visual demonstration of each number's value.   First, the kids each took a turn or two getting their fingers painted and stamping them onto our easel paper until we had the numbers from one to ten.   

Next, we played a little game by using these great number sticker tags to label each set of finger prints.  And, ta-da! :)  We now have our very own numbers poster that was lots of fun to make!
 
 
     This fun idea came from Teachpreschool.org and we really enjoyed making our own versions today.  We brought in some snow and got to work filling up the jars that we had decorated with paper features.
Once our snowmen were all filled up, I gave the kids a piece of paper with two empty jars on it for them to "record" what their jar looked like now, and again later after we had observed them for a while.  Seeing the kids record their observations is something that I have not really done with them before and it turned out to be MY favorite part.  :)
Once we had observed the snowmen for a few hours, we got out our papers and recorded our new data.  The snowmen faces helped give the kids good perspective as the snow melted.  There were a lot of great science vocabulary words being used today:  snow, cold, melt, warm, smaller, etc.  And a few of the kids were excited to take their snowmen home to recreate the experiment for their parents to see! :)
 
 
     A couple of the kids have been very interested in the letters of their names lately, so today I set out a pile of all the letters in each of the kids' names.  They sorted through them to find "their" letters.
     Next, they glued the letters down onto their papers like a puzzle, trying to get them in the right order to spell out their names and were very proud of their work!
 
 
     As I played our newest photo slideshow movie yesterday for the kids, they watched with almost constant repeating commentary of, "We should do THAT again!  We should do THAT again!"  What a great gift it was for me to be reminded of how much fun they had with the activities pictured from our past year together.   Although we'll have to wait a while to recreate some of the photos (like swimming, which several of them asked if we could do today! :) ), we were able to cross one off the list today.  I filled up the spray bottles with water and liquid water color and they set to work painting the snow in the backyard!  I always know it's a winner when they add that day's activities to their list of "Thank you God for..." at our lunch time prayer as they did today.  :)