Toy Factory, F, #9

Gathering:
Gears and blocks with ramps

Song: Reindeer Pokey
(Tune of Hokey Pokey)
You put your antlers in, you put your antlers out, you put your antlers in and you shake it all about, you do the reindeer pokey and you turn yourself around, Christmas is coming 'round.
You put your hooves in . . . (right, left)
You put your tail in . . .
Book: Who Will Help Santa This Year? by Jerry Pallota

Literacy:
-Each child writes the letter F on the whiteboard
Title: Falling Feather 
Description: Give each student a feather and experiment with Ff actions you can do with the feather (e.g., fall, fan, float, flip, fly, feel it on your face and fingers and feet).-

Math:
-Each child draws the number 9 on the whiteboard
Play Santa - Each child fills a stocking with 9 toys. Afterward, have children share toys with a  partner. Ask: How many toys do you have? How many does your partner have? See how many different combinations of 9 they can come up with?

Snack: Fruit (tangerines)
Break: Let kids dance with scarves and play music in living room

Science: Toy Factory
-Miniature Nativity Toy
One child puts "swaddling clothes" (felt triangles) on clothes lines, and sends them via pulley to the other side of the room where another child takes them off, and hands them to the next child. They hand them to a child who also picks up a baby Jesus (doll pin with sleeping face drawn on). The next child wraps the baby in the swaddling clothes, who hands it to someone who lays him in the manger. In the meantime, two other children have been getting the mangers (made of construction paper, would do cardboard in the future) ready by taking them off the counter and filling them with straw (shredded construction paper).

The kids really got into this and did a good job. We had teamwork, an assembly line, and a pulley. Had I been teaching both days this week, I would have planned more simple machines for the factory on Tuesday (using an inclined plane and perhaps wheels), then executed on Thursday, but it worked out as it was. I also thought a good part of the factory might be to gift-wrap the toy to give to someone, but we didn't do that this time.

Choosing time:
- Literacy/Science: Send messages via pulley system - as Kayla did on Tuesday - two buckets about 8 feet apart with a clothesline around them. Kids wrote messages and then sent them to their friends. They loved this! I have never seen kids so motivated to write, and this was even the second day!
- Sensory - fake snow with jingle bells inside, measuring cups, and ice cream scoop (This turned out better than I thought. By putting the jingle bells in there, there is a little jingling sound when one looks through the snow. It adds another sense, and the kids really loved it. Without being prompted, they counted how many bells they found - 24.)
- Engineering - Play with gears and blocks with ramps
- Art - candy cane paint - didn't do this because there was so much going on! Had prepared shaving cream and red paint, with a drop of peppermint extract in it to paint with. Good activity for my kids later.