Happy Valentine's Mardi Gras!

This has been a week for the record books!  We haven't been this busy in a long time--not even Christmas!  The way this week falls we have Valentine's to celebrate and Mardi Gras!  Both are a huge deal and since we are out all next week (Mardi Gras Holiday), we have to squeeze both holidays into one week.  Oh and did I mention it is also Registration Week for  our school!  Wow!  Here are some pictures from our week and some of our cute art and games.  These games and activities can be
found in my Hearts and More unit or in my Valentine's Bundle which is acutally 3 of my Valentine units together at a great price.

We are playing "Heart Attack" with our partners and chocolate of course!  There are 3 different game boards.  Some are playing with number 1-12, some with 1-15 and some with numbers 1-20, depending on their level.  They all look the same so most of my children never know they are different.

Of course we love to graph those candy hearts!  (And eat them)

 In our Mardi Gras study we read the  book Today is Monday in Louisiana by Johnette Downing.  We also have the song on her CD "From the Gumbo Pot".  We talked about all the foods that we eat that are unique to Louisiana.  We eat them so often, my kids thought that's what everyone in the country ate.  We made our own "Today Is..." book using pictures from magazines.  Now the children can read and sing their own books and ownership is often the key to them choosing a book to read.

 We read the story  The Day it Rained Hearts by Felicia Bond. Then we talked about how if it rained hearts, we would have so many Valentines to give away.  We put it with our poem and they chose who they would give their hearts to and we wrote them one on each heart.

 Another book we "wrote" is our Valentine Friends book.  I photo copied all of the students in our class and they got to choose 1 for each page.  They had to find the friend's name in our room and write it on the blank.Then they decided what color valentine they wanted to give that friend and glued the heart on the page.  They had to write the color word on the line.  Lots of heart cutting practice today!

 And last but not least, we had to make our Valentine bags for collecting our Valentine's at our party.  I had each parent write 4 things they loved about their child and we put them on the bags after we read them.  I think each of their own little hearts grew as they heard all the love from their parents!

Here in PreK world, I am all about connecting our art to our math and our literacy.  Many times we use our poem for the week and we make it a math lesson and an art project.  We love it when that happens!  For "O" week we did "Octopus" and we made different combinations of 8 with our beads.  Some of my kiddos did the same combination over and over.   That's totally fine with me because that's where they are.  Some kept trying to find new ways!

 We did groundhogs counting by 10's with our Groundhog poem.

 We subtracted banana's during our "M" week for monkeys.  I adapted Deanna Jump's monkey.  It was so super cute.  My girls wanted girl monkeys of course!