Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

We painted self portraits on aluminum foil. I drew a circle thinking it would give the students a boundary to paint in but didn't pre-cut the circles. I thought I could cut them afterwards and attach them to a hand mirror shape cut from construction paper. Well, that turned out to be a mistake because the students took advantage of the extra space to add more details like ears and hair to their faces. I didn't want to cut off parts of their artwork so I improvised. I created a frame around the aluminum foil using extra pieces of bulletin board borders. They were still mirrors and all the hard work and creativity could be displayed in our classroom.


Our colorful mirror paintings on display in our 4K room:

A few closeups- I just love all the attention to detail and time spent on these portraits. They each have their own character. 

Who Lives in Your House?

            As a part of our unit on families we made a glyph of the people in our family. I cut a simple house shape from black construction paper and squares of different colors to represent different family members. What a great beginning glyph activity! The students are beginning to learn that a glyph is a symbol that represents information about us. In this case out glyphs tell us who is in our family.

            I love the way these glyphs look on our bulletin board. Such a fun color combination. This is the first year I’ve used fabric as a background. So far it’s been a hit!


Our full bulletin board display: 

This sign explains to parents what a glyph is and helps them find the math tie in instead of just an art project:

All of our families look different:

Our Family glyph key shows us what the symbols mean:

Apple Art

We had tons of fun using apples in different ways during our apple unit! Wee sliced apples two different ways and did apple printing. It was a fantastic process art activity for our students and they really enjoyed it. It's always so much fun to watch their creativity bloom. We mixed cinnamon in with our paint to add an extra sensory experience to the activity. Boy did our room smell yummy!

Here's how our finished apple prints turned out.

We experimented with gravity and the laws of physics with our apple roll painting. We borrowed a slide from the playroom to serve as a ramp for our apples. We painted the outside of the apples, red yellow and green. Then we took turns rolling the apples down the paper covered ramp. Wow! what a great time. It was a bit messy but well worth it. 

Yummy Apples!

We kicked off our celebration of Autumn with a unit on apples. What a delicious week it was!

Everyone brought in an apple from home and we made an apple color graph on the carpet in our classroom.

We used a blender to make apple pie smoothies and graphed whether or not we liked the taste. They were so yummy all but one of our friends said yes! Here's the recipe we used in case you want to try them at home. Apple Pie A La Mode Smoothies


We read many fantastic books about apples here were some of our favorites 

We explored apples by cutting them apart in different ways. We used an apple slicer to cut red, green and yellow apples into small pieces for tasting. We picked a favorite and graphed the results before analyzing our data to see what kind of apple 4K liked best.

A is for Apples!

We kicked off our study of the alphabet with the letter. Although, we do not talk about the letters in order we like to start out with A and end with Z. This summer I found some wonderful resources online through pinterest and have been incorporating many new ideas into our classroom. We have taken inspiration from Montessori style practical life shelves and add what we call activity bins to our classroom and daily routine.


 We rotate these bins weekly to keep the activities fresh. The students have really been enjoying this fun new way to work on fine motor, math and literacy skills and build independence.

During A week we sorted acorns by size

Used tongs to put apples in a muffin tin. The tonging developed fine motor skills while putting one apple in each spot helped us practice one-to-one correspondence.

We used alligator shaped tongs to hone our fine motor skill farther by putting pom pons in a tray.

We used a template I found on childcareland.com  laminated and taped to a cookie sheet as a magnet board. For each new letter students attach magnets to the dots practicing one-to-one correspondence and letter recognition. They have even started playing a game with this bin in pairs where they split the magnets and take turns putting them on.

I have been really pleased by the hard work we are seeing during activity bin time. What a great way to make learning experiences feel like games.