Tuesday January 11th- our 5 senses (taste & sight)

We practiced our scissor skills and then went upstairs for playing with food and puzzles. At circle time, Claire helped with her star duties. I have been trying to emphasize our counting and have been working with that at calendar time. We sang days of the week and have started learning the months of the year. I introduced the students to our letter friends of the week- Mary and Martha Mouse who are the mouse twins. Mary is merry and happy all the time. Her sister Martha is the opposite and is always mad. They were wishing for some mittens in this cooler weather and like to drink milk. We also read all the words that begin with M and there are many :) We practiced the sound and the sign of the letter and did some wiggling.
After snacks, we were on to our lesson of the week- our 5 senses. We started with learning about taste. I read a story to the children on how our taste buds work and how they help us to send messages to our brain of what we are eating. We did a science project on how our taste buds work. I had four different types of food/liquid for the kids to try. We started with vinegar for bitter- the kids refused to try it but we did smell it and didn’t really want to try it at all. From there, we tried sour with a bit of lemon. Some of us liked the lemon but we all said that it was sour. For salty, I gave each child some pretzels and I let them know that the big crystals on them are salt and for sweet, we each had a Hershey kiss- which we liked the best!
For sight, I had all the kids close their eyes and ask them how they would be able to do their morning routine without sight. We all agreed that it is wonderful that we can. I talked about some of us whose eyes don’t work like they are suppose to so we can either have glasses or contact lens that you can’t see on the eye. We read a story about sight and how it is important to take care of our eyes- wearing sunglasses out in the sun and protecting when we need to.
For letter time, we read a story about Monkey’s Miserable Monday and how everything was going wrong until he realized that it was Sunday and he didn’t need to rush to school after all. We practiced our sign and sound for the letter M again, got our M stamp and we were ready to go.