December - A time for singing and celebrating

The theme for the month is love, so I put a lot of emphasis on how we treat each other.  I look for ways each day to "catch" them doing something kind or thoughtful for another class mate.  I encourage them to do nice things for their family members too and some of the best circle times are when they share what they did to help at home.

We stayed busy the whole month decorating our classroom for Christmas and making things to take home.

The kids really love to sing and there are so many fun Christmas songs to teach them.  We did "Jingle Bells" accompanied by wrist bands that had bells attached.  We sang "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer", "We wish you a Merry Christmas" and "Must be Santa".

Our letters for the month were L is for Love, M is for Music and S is for Santa.

We worked on math by making advent calendars and counting down the days to Christmas.

We also began learning about money.  In our sensory station the kids dug out coins and separated them into quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies.  Some of the kids even began understanding and using number sentences.