Group Meeting:  I explained to the children that our school will be participating in the Festival of Trees by decorating a Christmas tree.  Our theme this year is going to be dinosaurs.  While I hated to start Christmas so soon, we have to have the tree ready to deliver on Sunday.

Small Groups:  The activities for this week are listed below with the schedule for today.
Activity #1 (Red Group)  The children participated in a story problem math activity in which they pretended to be squirrels gathering and eating acorns.  They counted how many they had gathered, ate a number of them and counted how many were left.
Activity #2  (Yellow Group) The children painted and decorated wooden dinosaurs for our Festival of Trees tree.  (The dinosaurs didn't arrive in the mail until noon, so the morning Yellow Group didn't get to do theirs yet.  They will on Thursday.)
Activity #3  (Green Group)  The children listed to and answered questions about the book Rumble in the Jungle.  This is a follow up lesson that is part of the Read It Again program.

Story:  To go with our Christmas dinosaur theme, I read the book How Do Dinosaurs Say Merry Christmas? by Jane Yolen.   This book explains how dinosaurs should behave at Christmas time.  They should help decorate the tree, leave cookies for Santa, and share presents with others.  After the story, we discussed how children can do the same.

Large Group:  The children played a game called "Squirrels in the Trees".  The children took turns being trees and squirrels.  The squirrels had to scamper from one tree to the next to stay safe. 

Letter Learning:  The letter for today was Uu.

Snacks:  The morning snack was pretzels, avocados, and juice brought by Finn.  The afternoon snack was bananas and milk brought by Gage.  Thank you, Finn and Gage!