white paint on a snowflake shaped sponge.  Each child has had the opportunity to bring in their favorite book, and we have enjoyed hearing a wide variety of stories.  Our next literary project will begin with choosing and naming a stuffed animal as our “Wacky Wednesday pet”.  Each child will have a turn to bring the pet home for a week and then write a story about their adventures.  We will read the story at story time. 

We started the month of January making marshmallow masterpieces. Fine motor development combined with creative expression was the focus of this project.  The children used toothpicks and tiny marshmallows to construct buildings of all shapes and sizes.  Last week the children learned about community workers and gave thought to what they might like to do when they grow up.  The children expressed themselves both verbally and artistically at the table.  Batman, doctors, ice skaters, sensei’s, veterinarians and even a cat were among the many drawings.  This week the children will engage themselves with marble painting.  Red paper squares, circles or stars are placed in the appropriate size and shape pan.  The children add marbles coated with blue and white paint and tilt the pan back and forth to make the marbles move across the paper.  The results are very colorful!
 

The children have really enjoyed experimenting with jacks and different sized and shaped tops.  Some tops need to be turned with your hand and a flick of the wrist, which takes some practice, and other have a handle which needs to be pumped up and down.  Other tops had markers on the bottom and the children liked to watch the spiral design the tops made as they spun around on a piece of paper.

To go along with our theme on community workers the children pretended to be carpenters as they donned plastic goggles and manipulated screwdrivers.  They screwed and unscrewed both flat and Phillips head screws into blocks of wood with pre-drilled holes.  This activity strengthens eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills.  It also requires some thinking skills to figure out which way to turn the screwdriver to move the screw in the desired direction.

Dot-to-dot pictures have been available at the writing center this month.  There is a variety of skill levels to meet each child’s developmental needs.  Some pictures are numbered from 1-5,  others go up as high as 1-20.  There are also dots with upper and lower case letters rather than numbers next to them, and the children must follow the dots in alphabetical order.  Some children just choose to color the incomplete picture, and that’s fun, too! 

Currently there is tracing paper and shapes for the children to trace.  This activity hones fine motor skills, and introduces a variety of geometric shapes.

The math center has offered a brightly colored wooden bead game. Each bead has a different color and shape.  Wooden dowels have a place to stand inside the box and the beads are threaded onto the dowel to stack on top of each other.  The children are able to make their own pattern or follow the design on one of the pattern cards, which range in difficulty. This activity builds complex reasoning skills as well as sorting and fine motor coordination.    Next out at the math table will be a “picture peg” activity that develops a number of pre-math concepts and skills.