Games and Chocolate - it’s Monday!

My 3 year old moves fast during “school time” (actually all the time!) and I often run out of pre-planned activities for her. While I was trying to help my first grader with language today I told her to pick something out of the school cabinet to do (we have some puzzles, games, manipulative blocks, etc. that I change out). She came back with the Uno Moo game and I took this opportunity to work on sorting, counting, and patterns with her.
The Uno Moo game has different animals in different colors – we would take turns drawing one animal from the barn and finding the right group for it based on color (you could also do this based on animal type).

We also worked on counting with these little guys!

Finally, we worked on some simple patterns. I would line the pattern up and we would say it out loud together. When we got to the end I would ask what comes next?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, my first grader was spinning for sentences with this free resource from TeachersPayTeachers. Each spinner gave us a noun, verb, or adjective to create a sentence with. We had fun making silly sentences. To help with the copy work I wrote the sentence out on a white board for him.






We had a special treat in science today. We are still learning about weather and are finishing up our unit on clouds. We talked about the different things that clouds do for us and why they are important. One of the things that clouds do is provide shade from the sun. We tested this by putting a few pieces of chocolate chips in two little plastic cups. We set each cup outside, one in the shade and one in the sun. After about 30 minutes we checked on them to see what had happened. As we had hypothesized, the chocolate in the sun melted but the chocolate in the shade did not! Of course, we had to eat some chocolate too!

Here are the BEFORE pics. Chocolate in the shade and then, chocolate in the sun.

  

Here are the AFTER pics.

 

In social studies we are finishing up our unit on American symbols this week. Today we made a a cute little book about American symbols that I found for FREE at TeachersPayTeachers!



Until next time,
Tessa