Rolls, rhymes and raindrops

It was another chilly day here in Arizona and before the day began I received calls that three of the students would not be here today because of illness.  Most of them were fever, chills and head cold.  I hope that they will be well for next week.
I got up this morning and mixed up some dough for rolls, as this is letter R week After opening exercises we got our hands washed and came into the kitchen to get started.  When I mentioned that we were going to make rolls, the kids decided they wanted to make cinnamon rolls, so the fun began.  We got into the drawer, each picked a rolling pin,

 and after putting some oil on the table, I put a nice big blob of dough down for each child to roll into what they thought was a rectangle.  We had already gotten the other items together, so now we each had a knife to put the butter on to the dough. Then came a slotted spoon to help to evenly put the sugar and cinnamon mixture.  Next came some brown sugar.  Not the time came to roll up their rolls and they each did an amazing job!!  I gave them scissors and the cut of pieces and I placed them into their pie tin to raise and prepare for baking. We covered them with dish towels, to keep in the warmth for raising. The next four pictures show our masterpieces.

 Then we cleaned up our mess, washed our hands and prepared for our snacks.  While we were eating we discussed other things that started with the letter R and when the kids said rain, we just had to have an experiment.  We talked about how the water on the earth collected in rivers, pools, and oceans would raise into the atmosphere, form clouds and then when they are full would empty by raining.  I showed them with a pan and water and boiled it, just opening the lid enough for them to see the clouds, then how the water dropped from the lid to form "rain".

They had a lot to take in!!
Then they went down to the play room and we practiced rolling the balls back and forth to each other and even tried the "one bounce" activity.  There were lots of giggles!  Then out came the bowling balls and each took their turn knocking down the pins.

 Brigham went round and round on this little toy

   
It was time for table work and I gave them each a deck of cards.  They had to pull out the Queens and the aces, then match their suits.  Ivy did it in record time.

Then we talked a little bit about rhyming words and they chose Dr Seuss  book Hop on Bop  With the repetition of words, it made it pretty easy to have them repeat rhyming words.

I then pulled out some cards with the picture on the front and the word on the back.  We spelled them and sounded them out  These were beginning sounds of letters we have already worked with.

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To make sure that they know what an upper case and lower case "R, r" is we traced and colored these rain drops.  Upper case was green and lower case blue.  The umbrella was red for the upper case and purple for the lower case.  If they completed these exercises, they got stickers.  And with the completion of this, B got to choose a prize today

 Another rhyming game.  If the two pictures rhymed they would hold up the smiley face, if they did not rhyme, they held up the sad face.  They had fun doing this and we found out just who could rhyme.

Though we only had three here today, I think we all had a good time.  Another fun day at GranJan's prek.