Next we spent a day talking about Thanksgiving, and doing Thanksgiving activities. The Tuesday kiddos got to make pumpkin cookies! They had tons of fun mixing up the ingredients, and were very patient waiting their turn to add ingredients. And of course, they enjoyed eating the cookies for snack and taking some home to share!
Both groups enjoyed making their turkey craft, and especially enjoyed playing with the turkey's after the glue had dried. We definitely had a lot of turkey chasing going on that day! We even had a turkey come and visit us at preschool! He was a little cold because he lost his feathers, but the kids enjoyed adding feathers to him to help warm him up. We used megablocks to stamp corn kernals onto some blank corn shapes, even little Emily had a ton of fun using the mega blocks in a very different way!
Next we talked about trains! An alphabet train made a surprise stop at preschool, and the children had fun trying to match up the letter boxes to the correct train car. If you'd like a copy of the Alphabet Train to add in your own home, click here. The children put together their own train puzzle, and tried to match up numbered trains. It was a little tricky to figure out which trains matched, but eventually they got it. Jack discovered the "Barrel of Monkeys" during Free Time, and had a lot of fun counting the monkeys he was able to hook up, and tried to create some patterns.
Boats, boats, and more boats! This was such a busy day, that I hardly got any pictures! We talked about different jobs that happen on boats like raising the anchor, and starting the motor. The children had a lot of fun acting out all the different things it requires to make a boat go. We looked at pictures of different kinds of boats, and talked about how they were used. Of course the favorite boat was the pirate ship, and they incorporated some pirate play into their Free Time. Each child got to create a boat out of a paper plate, complete with a mast and sail. I had filled up our sensory bin with water the night before, and kept it hidden until we were ready to see if our boats would float. They did! The kidlets had so much fun blowing their ships across the bin. We then pretended that some tupperware containers were boats, and guessed whether they would float or sink. We grabbed some marbles and took turns adding marbles to the containers to make them sink. They had such excitement as the containers slowly got closer and closer to sinking, and shrieked when they finally did! Next, we looked around the room for different objects to test out whether or not they would sink. It turned into quite a crazy time, and poor Andrew was soaked by the end of the day! Even after I had taken the bucket away, they were "painting" the tables with the spilled water.
Next we talked about airplanes. We looked through Richard Scarry's "A Day at the Airport" and discussed all the things that happen inside an airport. We made decorated foam airplanes, and flew them around the room. They were trick planes, and did lots of flips before crashing to the ground. I created some paper airplanes that flew a lot better than our foam planes, and they enjoyed throwing them back and forth at each other. We created a line on the carpet, and played "In the Airport, Out of the Airport". One side of the line was in the airport, and the other was out of the airport. The children had to jump over the line according to what was called. They had a lot of giggles, as they kept getting mixed up about what side of the line to go to!
To wrap up our Transportation Theme, we talked about Emergency Vehicles. In writing time we practiced writing the different names of all the vehicles. We looked at all the different kinds of emergency vehicles, and how they help us. We made a firetruck out of different shapes, and even watched a short clip about a firetruck going to help put out a fire! We talked about what to do in an emergency, and had a pretend fire drill to practice. We made a booklet of all the different types of vehicles we may see in our neighbourhood, and the coloured the pages.
