Teddy Bears, Apples, and Bats

I have combined 3 weeks of themes on this post. We use teddy bears to learn about our 5 senses and labeling. Each child brings a teddy bear from home and we use them for math and science.

This is one of our math stations. They drop double sided counters on the table and record the amount of each color. It is showing different ways of making 5. They also record which color has more and which has fewer.

This activity is similar. They spill the counters and color the beans to match the counters.

What is a label? My sweet friend, Suzan Estes used to do this. I thought it was great and the kids absolutely loved it so of course I had to borrow the idea!!! The kids each get a post-it note with a body part on it and have to match it to me. There are lots of giggles!! It also helps them learn the names of different body parts.

We read, "Bears in the Night" every year. It is very short and uses mostly positional words. After reading, we use these words. Each child is given a word to "show" us.

out...

Up- He's jumping.  :)

Teddy Bear picnic eating teddy bear type foods:

Bats: One way that bats recognize one another is through scent. We became bats and found our bat family by matching scents. Each child received a cotton ball with a scent. There were four scents. After walking around and smelling each cotton ball, the kiddos found their families!

Bat Families:

How do bats stay warm? We learned that baby bats huddle together to stay warm while the moms hunt for food. We decided to huddle together and see if it works. Well, we learned that the person in the middle gets really hot. The next group was really warm. The outside group was warm but not as much as everyone else.

Apples: We learned all about apples. We learned the life cycle and seasons of the apple tree. We painted trees, made apple trees and talked about everything we could do with apples. The last thing we did to finish up our week was make apple pies. Normally we make homemade crusts, but this year we used canned biscuits as the crust. I liked it soooooo much better. We had counted and chopped apples to cook in the crock pot all day. We added milk, cinnamon, and sugar. That is what we used in our pies. Here's some sweet pics before we made our pies and during the process.

Here is one of my little chefs. He took some of our pies to the lunchroom to bake.

The finished product. Boy were they good!