Happy Thanksgiving from Desert Blossom Preschool! I hope everyone had a wonderful week off enjoying family and friends! We spent the week before turkey day learning about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving and enjoying the early snow! Wednesday and Thursday kiddos invited their families to join our friendship feast! Each child brought a different fruit and we mixed them all together to create a friendship fruit salad! We enjoyed good food and good company complete with an exciting turkey hunt! We all have so much to be thankful for! (Sorry Thursday families, I forgot to take pictures of your cute little pilgrims at their friendship feast.)

This month we are focusing on what we are thankful for and we sure are thankful for our friends at Desert Blossom! We read a story called The Spiffiest Giant in Town about a giant who is very generous to all his friends and in return his friends give him a crown as a special present. We also read Have You Filled a Bucket Today?  and How Full is Your Bucket for Kids. These two books are about the invisible bucket we each have. When our buckets are full we feel great, but when it's empty we feel awful. Everything that happens in a day either fills or empties your bucket. We discussed as a class how to fill other people's buckets by giving compliments, being kind, sharing, taking turns and being helpful. When you fill someone else's bucket it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside too and fills your bucket! Each kiddo has their own bucket on our bulletin board that we are filling with warm fuzzies when we see friends being bucket fillers! 

Preschoolers decorated their own friendship crown and as a class we thought about why each of our friends at school is a good friend and wrote the reasons on their crown. We made friendship bracelets for a classmate and worked together to bake friendship bread. Friends also enjoyed exploring the water beads on the light table, building with the friend blocks and matching friend's pictures with their names and playing outside in the early snow! 

The theme for November is family and friends! Last week we learned about different types of families and who makes up a family. We read books about families and sang songs about the members of our own families. We discussed who can be in your family, where families can live and what families like to do together. During circle time we explored a few different mathematical ways to record and analyze information about our families. We made a Venn Diagram to find out how many of our classmates were only children, and how many friends had brothers and/or sisters. Kiddos were exposed to a bar graph to see their Place in Their Family. We discovered that we have more oldest children than younger children in our class and four only children and one middle child. We made glyphs (simple pictures to record and analyze data) to show "Who Lives in our House?". We sorted our glyphs to see who had brothers and/or sisters and how many people lived in our house. Preschoolers made paper bags houses illustrated with the member of their family. We made family trees by straw blowing paint and thumb printing leaves. We made our first class book called We Love Our Families where kiddos wrote and illustrated what they loved about their own family! A favorite interest area activity this week was the baby washing tub and changing table! We also had lots of time outside running races, making leaf soup, playing in the sand, snuggling Twig and enjoying our friends!

We had such a spooktacular Halloween week at Desert Blossom! Monday was all about spiders! We read books and sang songs about spiders, worked together as a group to make a giant spider web and marble painted spider webs! Tuesday we were visited by ghosts! We sang the Five Little Ghosts song with our finger play ghost gloves and finger painted ghosts with homemade puffy paint. Wednesday we read more Halloween themed books, sang Halloween is Coming and painted candy corns with pom poms! Thursday friends came in costume to play spider web alphabet toss, pumpkin bowling, exploding pumpkin cano and mummy wrap! Mummy wrap soon turned into a indoor snowstorm to everyones delight! The Friday group did a little experimenting with candy corns. We put some in the microwave, freezer and in water to see what would happen. Our little scientists made some insightful observations! During interest area time kiddos used play dough to made faces on pumpkins, constructed masking tape mummies at the art table, created potions in the witch's brew and explored the jack-o-lantern swishy bags. Outdoor time allowed for learning through play at the fence chalkboard practicing the letter 'E' and hours of pretend play as puppies, kittens, families and even a few marriages and babies! Friends even found time to get a "haircut", create on the whiteboards and relax in the book nook to listen to a story! What a week!