Our classroom went to Children's Museum for a field trip on August 10th. We explored every floor and had tons of fun. We played at the community playground, check out Wallace and Gromit exhibition, created art, explored the space play place,  washed car, dodged lasers, climbed the wall and of course enjoyed over and over again the two stories slide. Check them out! 

This summer, we collaborated with Ready, Set, Smile, an organization who prepares and empowers all children in the community to care for their oral health through education and preventive services. Their trained community health workers came to our classroom to do an education about oral health with our children. They provided a 15-minute interactive presentation for all the children in the classroom featuring age-appropriate education, tooth brushing models, and take-home hygiene kits for every child. Then their dentist did a dental screening and cleaning. They also followed up with the parents after their visit. For more information, check out their website: readysetsmile.org 

When we read "Gingerbread Cowboy" the children seemed to be interested in more fairy tales stories so this summer, we explored more fairy tales stories. We started with the timeless fable of "The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse," by Mac Barnett. We transformed our pretend center into a puppet show corner with dress up clothes, puppets and popcorn. We wrote a postcard from the belly of the wolf. We continued with another famous fairy tales of The Tortoise & The Hare. We read one fairy tales after another. We tried to create activities that help children learn more about the stories. Since it's summer, our sensory table was always filled with water for the children to play, from bubble bath, alphabet soup where children learn to spell, helped fairy tales characters escape their icy capture to counting fish and rubber ducks. Check out their play in the classroom, the art they created and the activities they participated in! 

To culminate our bakery project, we compiled the recipes that we tried from the book that we read and other extra recipes from those books. So we gave them out to parents which hopefully would try the recipes at home with their children! Check out the recipes! 

Right before we went to Summer Break, we went on a field trip to the zoo. We read a book called "Never Ever Shout in a Zoo" by Karma Wilson. We had animal wash station in our sensory table, we talked about our favorite animals and we drew some animals (well.. the other half of the animals!). 
At the zoo, we did an animal scavenger hunt and all the kids found all the animals! We also saw a seal show. The weather was nice and it was a really fun trip! 

While we're learning letter Pp, we decided that we'd like to have a party. As party was one of the words that begin with letter Pp. So we did a "Pajama Party." When we decided what to eat, we voted and Pancake won over Pie. Pineapple also won over Peach and Pear. It was a fun and delicious day! 

As scheduled, every month Ms. Nora would come to our classroom and we had a wonderful time singing, dancing and playing musical instruments! 

Phase 2 of the project, we continued to do more baking and invited more experts to answers some of the children's questions from phase 1. We changed the pretend center into a bakery, where children can sell bakery goods such as cakes, cookies, breads etc. The main area is the sensory table which act as a kitchen where children can pretend making cookies and cakes with cloud dough. Children surrounded by books about baking and activities that enforce the project. For every books that we read, we did activities to support children's knowledge in the project. We talked about things we can make with apples, & apple tasting when we read Apple Farmer Annie, we decided what can we put in our version of Friendship Pie when we read Porcupine's Pie, we made cake from sponges, we made art mixing baking soda and vinegar and more. We also did scrap paper collages, magnet art, bubble painting, our own gingerbread person, string art and even dandelion bouquet. 
We had a visitor from a cake decorator (Ms. Olivia) and had a wonderful time decorating (and eating) our own cake. Of course, we did a life painting of it before we ate it! 
Oh.. we don't want to forget about the runaway gingerbread cowboy, we made it, put it in the oven then he ran away, we looked everywhere until we found it hiding in one of the room so we hurry ate it up!  

Once a month, our preschoolers got a visitor from MacPhail Music. Ms. Nora, our music teacher from MacPhail, would teach us new songs, have us play with variety of musical instruments and move and dance. We are always excited to see her! 

Based on our observation in December, we came to a project that the children seemed to be interested in which is Baking and Bakery. So the classroom went through some changes to create an environment where children can learn more about baking and bakery. The pretend center is now a baking center where everywhere else are supporting play area to help children learn more about the project. Our first book to read was "The Little Red Hen," where she made a loaf of bread. So we did a bread test where children tried different kind of bread and decided which one they like best. The activities after that based on the books we read or the letter we were learning. All the activities were done to help children learn more about baking and bakery and answering all their questions about them.  During the month of February, while we kept learning about baking, we were also celebrating the month of LOVE and Black History Month!