Hi Mom,
I love you! This week was all about love and the letter Vv. V is for Valentines, Volcanoes and Very exciting things happening in preschool!
We began with a graphing activity to practice creating and reading bar graphs. We each got a giant handful of Hershey's Kisses and placed them by color on our labeled bar graph papers. When we had each placed all of our red, silver and pink wrapped kisses on our graphs, we compared the colors on our own graphs and compared our graphs to others. We answered questions like "Who has the greatest number of pink kisses?" and "Who has the least number of red kisses?" and "Does anyone have any columns with equal numbers of kisses?" We also practiced using the lines and labels on our graphs to read the amounts of each color kiss we had instead of counting them individually. 
Since this week was Valentine's Day, Ms. Marianne helped us to make a special Valentine for you! She took pictures of us holding a sign that read "Be Mine" and then we painted and decorated a wooden frame to hold the picture. We also created a special Valentine out of a big foam heart and smaller Valentine stickers, puffy hearts and foam Conversation Hearts. Did you like my Valentine gift? I had so much fun making it for you! There are so many great Valentine's Day books out there. This week, we read a few including: The Biggest Valentine by Steven Kroll, and The Night Before Valentine's Day (a variation of the famous Christmas poem) by Natasha Wing.
We also learned a new song! It is called "Will You Be My Valentine" and is sung to the tune or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". It goes like this:
Will you be my Valentine?
Pretty please won't you be mine?
A kiss for you and a kiss for me,
I love you and you love me too.
Will you be my Valentine?
Pretty please won't you be mine?
Candy is such a big part of Valentine's Day. We played with candies, but didn't really get to eat much... we were bummed by this! But we did get to play with them in many of the activities we did this week, like the Kisses graphing. We also used Kisses to do some beginning addition! Ms. Marianne gave us a worksheet in a plastic cover that we could write on. We'd pick out a number of Kisses (of our choice) and put them in the first circle, then do the same for the second circle and then write the corresponding numbers below the circles. Then we'd count all of the Kisses and write that number below the third circle. This created a basic number sentence / equation for us to read off and have Ms. Marianne check. For example: "Three pink Kisses plus four red Kisses equals seven Kisses in all!" We each worked with these sheets and the Kisses for about 4 number sentences. We also used the brightly colored Conversation Hearts to match patterns that Ms. Marianne gave us and to make our own patterns too! 
Candy also made it's way into Science this week. We did a science activity called Dancing Hearts that Ms. Marianne found at www.inspirationlaboratories.com. Here is a video that shows what our Dancing Hearts looked like!
From their website to explain the Science behind the Dancing Hearts: "Baking soda and vinegar react to form carbon dioxide, water, and a salt. Carbon dioxide gas are the bubbles you see during the reaction. The bubbles rise to the top lifting the candy hearts up. Bubbles leave the bottom of the candy heart, and the heart falls back down. The bubbles are essentially pushing the candy around making them seem to dance." All of us loved watching our colored heart dance around with our friends' hearts. :)
A huge highlight of this week was our VOLCANO eruptions! We talked about volcanoes and what makes them erupt. We used words like lava and magma. Then Ms. Marianne gave us each our own volcano and dinosaurs and showed us how to make them erupt using drops of vinegar & water. We had a BLAST playing with our volcanoes and dinosaurs. Some of us made the lava overtake the dinosaurs... and some dinosaurs even ended up IN the volcanoes! :) This was a great activity to talk about chemical reactions between ingredients (salt / baking soda / water / vinegar) and also practice our fine motor skill of pinching to fill and slowly empty the water dropper to make the eruption happen a bit at a time. We took home an extra pouch of the erupting powder so that we could play some more at home with our volcanoes and dinosaurs!
After some Valentine's Day fingerpainting for Art, we celebrated Valentine's Day with a party! Each friend brought a special treat from home and Valentines for each of the other students in class. We decorated Valentine mailboxes to collect our cards in, made a heart shaped pizza and then enjoyed our party time- snacking and sharing and smiling. :)
Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne
