Last week we learned about flower gardens/water gardens..so this week we focused on vegetable gardens. I(and the kids too!) had a lot of fun this week! Here are some of the activities we did: -Read food books including "Growing Vegetable Soup" and "Gus the Horrible Eater" -Planned our own vegetable soup..students drew and labeled vegetables (with their own pre-k spelling!) and we "put them in the pot" (butcher paper pot) -My assistant read a Spanish book about making soup..each student added a felt vegetable to the felt pot...then they played with the felt set as a center. -Counted vegetable syllables..highlighted letters in vegetable words..discussed beginning letter sounds of vegetables. -Sang "Vegetable Soup" and "Making Pizza with My Momma" -Did the fingerplay "Peter Rabbit and the 10 little Carrots" -sand rhyming words (included potato, tomato!!) -played Mr. Potato Head game and hot potato -Measured vegetables with unifix cubes and compared the sizes! -Played vegetable bingo (included letter sounds) -Had a celery taste test and completed a celery bubble chart (crunchy, green, stringy, watery, etc. and included the 5 senses!) -Did a celery color experiment (we observed how the leaves drink the water from the roots) -Planted herbs and voted on names for our two class plants..Tin Tin and Mara (oops we forgot to water them today!) -Created a tops/above and bottoms/below vegetable chart to show which vegetables grow above and below ground..labeled with pre-k spelling and practiced positional words! -Had our own farmer's market in the pretend center! -Sorted seeds and did one-to-one correspondence in the science center. -Explored the insides of vegetables..counted the seeds inside. -Stamped with peppers, potatoes, and celery, and paints! -annnd finally...cooked our very own vegetable soup today!! ....also this week: -we reached our community "working together" goal of six cupcakes on the board! ..we had cupcakes along with our soup today! -we attended an exciting assembly this morning where pre-k did an awesome job of singing and doing hand motions to twinkle twinkle and five little ducks! -we completed all the sunny squares in our weather graph and planned a sunny party for Monday! ..they came up with ideas all on their own and we listed them on the board..they decided to wear their yellow school uniform shirts, drink lemonade, where their sunglasses, and eat yellow foods like bananas. I'm going to add in some "Sun Chips" and probably some yellow candies or iced cookies. -we added two HUGE! grasshoppers, a fat little caterpillar, and some snake skin to our science center..all of which the kids found on the playground... all creatures were released at dismissal today :) I guess the kids are a bit over excited about all the spring creepy crawlies on the playground..we studied Eric Carle insects the week before.. a poor frog got squeezed a little too much..because some of our prek friends got a little to excited and well..he's in froggy heaven :( I hope we never find the snake who lost his skin! yikes!