A Week About Ourselves & Our Bodies

This week we are learning about ourselves, each other and our bodies.  Today we worked hard on an "All About Me" book (see learning station).

Science - Digestive System - We talked about all the different parts of the digestive system and what they do.

Teeth - chew and break our food up.
Saliva (spit) - helps to start the break down of our food & slide it down.
Esophagus - the tube that leads to the stomach, and we swallow our food down.
Stomach - breaks down our food further with the help of acid.
Small Intestines - pulls out the 'good stuff' for our bodies
Large Intestines - pulls out the water, what is left is pooped out.

We chewed up crackers and noticed how our teeth work, how our spit helps and we felt our lump of cracker slide down our throats.  Next we put a cracker or two into a baggie (stomach), smooshed it up, added some lemon juice (stomach acid) and watched how the cracker started digesting.  Pretty cool stuff! 

Stomach Art - We drew what we had eaten today.

Poop Cookies - or No Bake Cookies - We had talked about the time it takes for our food to pass through our system (about a day).  So we decided we should make some poop cookies.

Sunshine! - Sidewalk Chalk - Today was unseasonally warm so we took advantage of it!

This kiddo drew ninjas...

Dry Erase Faces - This was a hoot!  The kiddos drew on themselves or their friend's with dry erase markers.  I printed a 5x7 picture of each kiddo and laminated them.

Body Tracing -  We got everybody traced today, we'll add to ourselves on Friday.

How Tall Wall - Using the measurements we took from our "All About Me" books, we decided to create a tall wall to compare our heights.  We'll add the kiddos from the younger class too.

  
Battleship - The kiddos in my youngster class have really taken a shine to playing with Battleship.  They don't play it properly of course, but they love to place the ships and the pegs and make up stories.  Sometimes they use the consuls as laptops.  You can see the kiddo in the back was creating a pattern with her pegs.  Excellent fine motor work!

Self Portraits - The kiddos in my youngster class did self portraits today.  I should have had a mirror out for them to look in.  But they turned out cute anyway.

Here are the self portraits for the toddlers:  These were a fun collage to create.  I cut stuff for the kiddos as they asked.

Journal Time - I found these stickers at Michael's and thought they would be great for this week.

 

The Demise of the Snow Cave - While I am enjoying the warmer weather, I am sad for our snow cave.  

Digestive System - We reviewed the digestive system today by adding it to our body tracing.  We got our system on, but the body could use some more work, we simply ran out of time today.

Learning Station - "All About Me" Book

This was fun to do with the kiddos.  I really enjoyed all their comments and questions as they worked.  I loved as they talked with and helped each other.

I just put together a little book with typical pages such as:

Here is a picture of me
My favorite colors are
Here is a picture of my preschool teacher
I have __ people in my family, here is a picture of them
This is my house
I am ___ feet and ___ inches tall
My favorite snack is
If i could have any pet it would be
My favorite thing to play with at preschool is

This worked great for the preschool class.  The youngsters could have done with half as many pages.  So we are working in their book for two days.  It was a lot of drawing for them, but I wanted the book to be their work, their drawings.