Fabulous February

February may be the shortest month, but it is the richest in celebration opportunities! In my class, we celebrate anything and everything. So, thank you, February! This year we even get an EXTRA celebration with Leap Day on the 29th!

Right off the bat, we celebrated Ground Hog's Day by having a flashlight Groundhog hunt. We found groundhogs and their shadows.

Although the day started out cloudy, the sun came out in time for us to go outside and make our own shadows. Each child told me what his shadow was doing and we compiled them into a class book that the children can take home and share with their families. It looks like our local Groundhog, General Beauregard Lee, is being true to his word because we are either having a very mild winter or a very early spring here in Georgia!

This shadow is being Tinkerbell!

Then, of course, there's the February biggie ~ Valentine's Day. We spent a lot of time on that, counting plastic hearts, playing Hugs and Kisses tic-tac-toe, making Valentine surprises and decorating our classroom.

We played mailman and delivered our Valentines to all our friends and we made St. Valentine puppets with our moms.

We read the book Be My Valenslime  by J.K. Arden. Then we made slime with cornstarch, water and food coloring. It was so much fun. We had slime everywhere. 

February is also Dental Health month so we painted with tooth brushes and with dental floss.

                                We made elephant toothpaste and discussed taking care of our teeth.

And then it was President's Day. Since Presidents are well-represented on our coins, we started a unit on money. We are doing a continuing spend and save activity. The children made paper "piggy banks". Each day they get a penny which they can spend or save. The first day all but one child spent their penny on a Hershey Kiss. Then they started to figure out that there might be something they wanted more.

By day three, they were even realizing that they could save up and get more than one thing. We will continue this activity for at least another week.

 Right on top of that was Mardi Gras. For some reason, I don't have a picture of the masks we made, but we did celebrate with a Kings Cake and some stories about New Orleans.

And last but not least, we get Leap Day on the 29th. Since this falls right in the middle of our Dr. Seuss' Birthday celebration,Wacky Wednesday, we will make origami frogs, play Leap Frog, and read Theo LeSieg's Would You Rather Be a Bullfrog? I'll write more on that next week. 

Hooray for holidays, celebrations and February!