We had ourselves a merry little Christmas at Desert Blossom! So much fun was had by all decorating, making ornaments and gifts, constructing our own Polar Express train and baking sugar cookies in our PJ's! We squeezed in some name practice in shaving cream snow, and number recognition/counting with our Polar Express dice game. Preschoolers enjoyed painting wrapping paper with jingle bell paintbrushes at the easel, matching colors with Christmas lights, exploring in the hot cocoa sensory bin, jingle bells and magnets at the science table, baking cookies in the home living area and candy cane science! We enjoyed a Saturday morning trip with families down to Sunriver to check out the gingerbread junction and be awarded with a 3rd place ribbon in the kindergarten/preschool division for our gingerbread stories house! The kiddos all were so wonderful at our Christmas performance for our families, what a special night! Such a magical time of year!

Gingerbread stories are so much fun and tasty too! We began our week constructing our gingerbread house for the Gingerbread Junction in Sunriver benefiting Habitat for Humanity. We created quite a masterpiece that tells the stories of The Gingerbread Boy, The Gingerbread Girl, Gingerbread Baby, The Gingerbread Man and Gingerbread Friends. Our gingerbread house will be on display in the lodge at Sunriver through the holidays. Make a trip down there to check it out!

On Wednesday we read The Gingerbread Man Loose at School followed by baking and decorating our own gingerbread people. We left them to cool while we went outside to play and when we came back inside we discovered they had ran away! Luckily they left clues for us to follow and we found them across the street at Jackson's Corner! We enjoyed those sneaky treats with a warm cup of hot chocolate!

We played some fun gingerbread math games that helped us work on 1:1 correspondence and number recognition. Friends played gingerbread bakery in the dramatic play kitchen, decorated foam gingerbread ornaments at the art table, dressed a giant gingerbread, wrote letters in salt trays at the light table, decorated gingerbread house mats with play dough candies and practiced spelling out their names in gingerbread letters. We also were busy practicing our songs and poems for our Christmas Show next week! We love this magical time of year!