At our centers today we enjoyed playing with the new toys on the rug. Our rug center usually has something to encourage dramatic play (kitchen , puppets, dollhouse, etc.) and something that's large scale manipulative (blocks, gears, giant legos, etc.) This week we had our dollhouses and our colored blocks. (For the first few minutes, the children didn't get the dolls out of the crate. They just studied and explored the dollhouses with all of the doors, windows, and details!)
At Mrs. Hennessy's center we used our geoboards. These are plastic pegboards that we use for rubberband designs. While we worked we talked about the color of the rubberbands, some of the shapes that we made, and used a lot of direction words (up, down, top, bottom, across, etc.) When we finished, some of us colored some pictures to bring home.
At Miss Kathleen's center, we used our glue pots for the first time this year. We practiced holding the brush by the red lid and spreading glue all over our gingerbread men. Then we covered them with squares of paper! We were so neat and careful! As we waited for our friends to finish, we sorted teddybears. (Well, today was more just exploring with the teddybears! After the newness wears off, we'll work on sorting by colors and making sets.)
After we cleaned up our centers we went outside to play with our friends. When we came in we had a wonderful snack of circles and squares (Cheerios and Frosted Mini-Wheats) before choosing a book to take home with us.
