December: Ice and Mud

The playground has been an interesting combination of mud and ice this week. Two things that you can't keep children away from, even if I tried. 

Somebody was very proud of their discovery. 

She thought I couldn't see her eating the ice. She kept peaking around the corner at me.

Frozen mud, even better!

Trying to break ice.

This will work better!

I have no idea what this was all about. It went on for about ten  minutes. Very serious conversations going on.

In case you are wondering if this ice "plate" ever left his sight, it did not.

Just when you think its a bucket full of muddy freezing cold water....

...turns out to be hot cocoa!

Meanwhile inside this week...


Liquid Watercolor:

Beads and Patterns

Library

I just realized that this was still sitting in the "drafts." Oops. Sorry for the overflow of posts today! I thought I had posted them all and realized they have just been sitting there!  This was when we added a library to our town!

Checking out books

Storytime

Our Maps

The children were able to create their own individual maps of our town. We used a lot of positioning words when transferring the locations on our big map to the little maps. (Across from, next to, behind, above etc...)  It was amazing to see how many of them remembered exactly what every building on the map was intended for.  Some of them added now features to their own maps as well.

The maps I provided them with, which is a duplicate of our big map.

Looking at the big map and using our memory to figure out where everything went.

Here are a couple of the finished products:

Making our Map into a "Real" Town

Our Completed Group Time Map

While they watched and guided me, I taped paper trips to the floor to recreate the roads from our map.
Then we added the railroad tracks through the town.

Taking a break from all this hard work.

We had a lot of fun brainstorming what we could use from the classroom to create each
destination on the map. My favorite is the slide and monkey bars from the dollhouse for the playground.

I wrote out the labels and read them to them as they stuck them around town. I had intentions of having them rewrite the labels the next day to replace mine, but the town didn't last that long. :)