Long and Good Week

It's Friday!!!!!! It was a struggle to make it through this week. Christmas break spoiled me, so getting up early and working all day was a challenge. The white-out conditions I drove the 36 miles home in this afternoon didn't help either. I officially gave up Facebook this week, so I've been venturing into the blog-o-sphere to find something else to occupy my internet time. It has been beneficial in so many ways. I've found so many excellent blogs with great ideas for the classroom. I'm currently working on building a board game called Race to the Finish that I'm basing off an idea from The First Grade Parade's Race to the Snowman. It ties in nicely with our transportation study and encourages one-to-one correspondence and number recognition.

The study has been going well so far. I've been introducing map skills during this study too, and it's fun to see the kids using the vocabulary and making their own maps. On Wednesday, I had them work as a group to make a map of our town. They did a superb job building their houses, the preschool, the pool, a couple of restaurants in town, the grocery store, and the library out of blocks. I even had them create labels for their buildings. When they were done building and labeling, they had fun driving small cars (and even airplanes :P) to the different places in town.

Today, they drew maps of their bedrooms. It was funny to see how detailed they got. One make sure to draw the exact number of Barbies she had and exactly where they were in her room. Very detail-oriented.

The week's funny: One of my three year-olds has been calling me by just my last name. He leaves the Mrs. off. It cracks me up every time. Also, one of my four year-olds was building a tower today. When he accidentally knocked it over, he exclaimed, "Oh nuts!" Hilarious!