An Enchanted Childhood~ Daycare:Week 5

We have been asked many times to write up our "lesson plans" so others could use them.  Honestly, we just spend a little time thinking about how we want the "school year" to look and go from there.  We wing-it a lot, doing impromptu things that add to our plans.  I am always amazed that anyone would think what we do is worthy of writing down for others to read, but here it goes!

This year, we are doing "Childhood Classics"--reading great children's books--you know, the kind every child should get to know, and then doing little activities to go with it.

This week, I wanted to teach the children about the four seasons.  I chose the set of books: The Four Seasons by Maria Rius: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall.  Each book has awesome illustrations and simple text about everyday living within the particular season.  We also read My First Flip Flap Book of Seasons. The children really liked it because it had several flaps to open.


Monday-- We read My First Flip Flap Book of Seasons.  We sang our "seasons" song : "Winter, spring, summer, fall.  Thank you God for making them all."  We talked about what outside activites we can do in each season.  We acted out various seasonal activities... swimming in the summer, shivering and throwing snowballs for the winter....

Tuesday-- We sang our "seasons' song and re read My First Flip Flap Book of Seasons.  We then read Winter.  For CreativeTime, we decorated Ws by coloring them various shades of cool blue and adding winter stickers and cotton "snowballs".

Wednesday-- We again sang our seasons song and reviewed the four seasons.  We read Spring.  We then water-color painted a print out of birds in a nest.

Thursday-- We read Summer.  The children then drew their own picture of a garden and flowers, using markers,  When they were finished, they decorated their work with summer stickers--suns, insects...  Finally, the rain ended and we were able to go outside for a nature walk and some "gathering" of nature to bring home!!  During CircleTime, we sang some songs and I challenged the children to find the object we were singing about when we went on our walk: leaves falling down, mushrooms, a spider and a web, squirrels and nuts....

Friday--We re read all the previous books.  (Notice we did not read about fall yet.. I am devoting all of next week to that season!)  During CreativeTime, we did an awesome project!  We decorated four trees, one for each season.  For winter, the children used qtips dipped in white paint to make snow.  For spring, they used qtips again in light green paint to make little leaves.  For their summer tree, they used a bath scrunchie dipped in dark green paint to paint a fully leaved tree.  And for fall, they dipped their index finger in green, yellow. orange, and brown paints to make fall leaves!

Additionally, each day, we talked about what letter the season began with.  We made the sign and sound for the letter.