Our theme today was HOUSES. There are all different kinds of houses people and animals can live in. And what better way to introduce the topic than by the classic story of The Three Little Pigs. All the kids knew the story and helped me along in the story-telling when we got to the bad wolf parts with the huffing and puffing. After the story, we colored the little pigs' houses and practiced sorting the pigs to the right houses. They did really well, albeit, a couple had purple straw houses instead of yellow straw...but they offered some "logical" preschool explanations for the change of color.
We used the building blocks to make houses, castles, forts, and even a shopping mall. One little guy said he build a "town"...good thinking! It never ceases to amaze me how much fun kids have with really basic toys like blocks. They build towers, use them as borders to other activities, ammo (thank goodness these are foam :), and just have fun layering them up.
One of the fun things that we did in class was play a game called "Which House is Mouse in?" There were ten different colored houses on the floor and one of them had a mouse inside. Each of the kids took turns identifying the color of the house and guessing where the felt rodent could be. They had to say: "Little mouse, Little mouse, are you in the purple house?" and then lift the house to see if he was under it. They loved taking turns and finding the mouse. **Teacher's admission: They were not too young to explain the notion to cheating to. We had a couple of "peakers" and they were cautioned that everyone had to play fair in their turns. But we had lots of squeals of delight and good guesses in our House game.
Next week is going to be so much fun learning about our Five Senses.
