Group Meeting:  The children are going to be decorating a tree for the Festival of Trees.  Today, I read the story The Mitten Tree by Candace Christiansen (no relation:).   This is a story of an elderly lady who notices that some of the children who are waiting for the school bus do not have warm mittens.  She decides to knit mittens for the children and hang them on a tree near the bus stop for them to find.  We are going to use this story as a theme for our tree.  The children will be decorating wooden mittens during small group time to hang on the tree.

Small Groups:  The activities for this week are listed below as well as the schedule for today.
Activity #1  (Red Group) The children will use duplos to solve simple math problems.  Following picture cards, they counted a number of colored blocks, but them together to make a tower, and counted them.
Activity #2 (Yellow Group) The children used paint, rickrack, jewels, and glitter to decorate wooden mittens for the Festival of Trees tree.
Activity #3  (Green Group)  The children sorted dinosaurs into various categories such as color, type of dinosaur, horns/no horns, long neck/short neck, etc.

Story:  I read the story Corduroy by Don Freeman.  This is the story of a bear who lives in a department store.  Lisa would like to buy him, but he's missing a button on his shoulder strap.  At night, Corduroy wanders through the store looking for the button.  Ask your child to tell you if he finds his button. 

Large Group:  Following the story of Corduroy, we had a discussion on friendship.  The children are going to be learning a new way to get a friends attention.  We practiced tapping a friend on their shoulder and saying their name.  Please take a few minutes to look at the note that was sent home in backpacks today about this program.

Letter Learning:  The letter for today was Ww.

Snacks:  The morning snack person was Julia.  She brought Goldfish and juice.  The afternoon snack person was Jaxon.  He brought French toast bagels, cream cheese, and juice.  Thank you, Julia and Jaxon.