JellyFish

On Monday morning we started learning the letter J.  J the jellyfish jiggles, in case you were wondering :)  I opened up the idea of jellyfish by having all my ocean animal books all over the floor.  After reading a few of them we turned our attention to National Geographic to teach us some specifics.  The site I used is {here} and was excellent! 

 We even took the word tentacles and decided to trace the tentacles on the picture of the jellyfish.

 We learned that the letter J likes to hang out with his friends, so we made a jamboree party of stamp letters.  All the letters we know (a dozen total now) got to join the party.

 Very fun!

 We also practiced tracing the letter J and some basic prewriting tracing sheets.  These ones here are from my winter pack.

 For snack, the obvious choice was Jellyfish!  Or, Jell-o.  It was a hit!  I don't think I've ever served Jell-o for snack before, and each child ate 3 of them!  I put the Jell-o in cupcake pans and then popped them upside down onto their plates as their jellyfish.  The idea I followed suggested putting gummy worms as tentacles around it, but honestly I didn't have enough time to go buy any.  I don't think the kids noticed anyway :)

 Our art for the day came from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We used markers and chalk to color a jellyfish and then glued some tentacles on them.  I started encouraging the kids to write their names at the top of their papers, and the reactions to that were as varied as being upset about it to completing it and moving on before I even knew it.  We'll keep practicing that and I'm sure by the end of the year we will get it right!

 M is making her jellyfish jiggle.

 We worked a little on our TouchMath work mats and we're ready to move on tomorrow!

 We also had a fish themed "Go Fish" game going on.  Steven was home and asked to sit in on preschool and I was thrilled when I split the kids into two groups that he stayed with the Go Fish group and helped them play.  I heard later that every mom heard about playing Go Fish with Mr. Steven.  I think that was the highlight of their day.  We used the Ocean Montessori Match up game from 1+1+1=1 and made it a go fish game.  All the pieces were upside down in the middle and each person playing got a game board.  Players picked up 3 cards and put any of the matches they had in their hand on their boards.  Then we took turns asking each other for cards that would match our boards.  If the other player didn't have it they said, "Go Fish!" and you picked up an extra card from the middle.  So much fun!

 The boys worked on their one-to-one correspondence work mats from TouchMath.  I'm so thrilled that I can do them on the SMARTBoard, think of all that paper we're saving!

 We, of course, had to have some crab walk races as well.  It is still pretty difficult for the kids to do this, but they were trying as hard as they could!

 To wind down a bit at the end of preschool we got out the manipulative boards and got to work.  It's amazing how at the beginning of the year all of these skills were difficult, but now everyone is getting so much better at them!  If you don't have manipulative boards like this they simply have buttons, zippers, snaps, laces, ties and buckles and you can easily find most of those things in your closet!

I'm still in overdrive trying to get things accomplished.  I just finished planning for preschool tomorrow (more ocean animals) and still need to accomplish some lesson plans for our new afternoon class.  A friend and I are starting a Spanish and ASL (and English) trilingual class tomorrow afternoon with our playgroup.  It's intended for moms with infants through school age kids.  Unfortunately my Spanish curriculum didn't ship when I was told it would, so it isn't here yet.  Bummer.  It just means I have to make some stuff up for tomorrow.  I'm off to work on that.  I'm sure you'll see in a post or two how it worked out!