Heart Shaped Christmas Trees and some coin talk

This past week, my classes constructed these Christmas trees out of hearts from Reagan Tunstall's Christmas Arts pack, available in her TPT store:

If you've purchased her pack, you can see that I adjusted the activity... I opted to let my preschoolers freely decorate their tree and didn't have them make a pattern out of the ornaments... although, of course, I would have loved to have them do it.  My kids have gotten really good at extending patterns, but making patterns is still a work in progress.  I also opted not to use the square or triangle ornaments... just the circles.  Although everything was precut for them.... as you can tell from just a few trees that fit in the picture, each tree came out unique.  We completed this craft after reading The Biggest, Most Beautiful Christmas Tree, and my preschoolers were excited to be able to make their own big and beautiful tree!

Here is an extending patterns practice page that we did.... from Mailbox

We also got practice recognizing numbers and counting with this Mailbox page featuring pennies...

Speaking of pennies.... I review coins and coin values EVERYDAY with my preschoolers since I know that coins and coin values are taught and expected to be learned by the end of Kindergarten.  From my experience teaching Kindergarten as a Long Term sub, it takes awhile for kids to learn coins.  So, I figured, why not expose them in Preschool.  Can't hurt, right?  One of my preschool parents has a son in my 4 year old class and a son in Kindergarten and told me that her Kindergarten son, who is learning coins in Kindergarten, got upset that his preschooler brother knew all of the coins and he didn't!  He was upset, too, that he wasn't taught coins in preschool  : )  Of course, not all of my preschoolers have learned all of the coins and values, but several have, and this makes me smile!

I use poems that I found HERE on Jessica Meacham's website.  Under December, January, February and March, click on Coins.  Clicking on the coins link will give you access to her free printables of the poems.  I made the Shared Reading Chart Sized Posters!  Before I found blogs, I found Jessica Meacham's website, and let me tell you, it is a valuable resource.  I've taken and used a lot of her ideas!

This week I will be doing a gingerbread theme, and I was excited to find a free gingerbread printable (ordering numbers 11-20), from Fran Kramer that you can find HERE...and as I was writing my post, she posted ANOTHER gingerbread freebie (writing lowercase letters to match the given uppercase letter)!!!  Yay!