E is for Elephant

Today was a lot of fun as we explored the letter E.  E the elephant exercises in our Amazing Action Alphabet, so we started the day by watching some videos about trained elephants and strong men at the circus.  The kids were completely enthralled with the videos and were excited to move on to reading our "E Book" about all the tricks an elephant can do.  Next we used balloons and drinking straws to make our own "weights".  Since we've been talking about heavy versus light lately in our math curriculum of comparisons they had a great time pretending their weights were super heavy.

 Our activity today for art included an A-B-C dot-to-dot.  We have been learning the alphabet in non-alphabetic order and I realized today that we need to do some more fun sequencing games with the letters of the alphabet.  Some of the kids caught on once we were singing very slowly and others had a hard time following the directions.  It was a great activity to see where we were at with both alphabetizing and following directions.

 We also made elephant stick puppets for art.

 With our elephant stick puppets we played some musical chairs, or rather our version of it.  We don't actually take chairs away but they love racing to a seat!

 I introduced the vocabulary word "alike" today.  We continued our sorting of objects according to a single attribute and identifying what doesn't match and why.

 Yet another realization for myself: you can't ask 3 and 4 year olds to draw an "X" on the one that doesn't match if you haven't taught them what "X" is.  We're still a few weeks away from learning that one - oops! :)

 As we worked on identifying things that are "alike" we also started delving into the attribute of color.  This was a little bit trickier until we colored all the objects in.

 This class has learned a lot this year and I love how they are so actively participating and raising their hands when they have done their thinking in their heads.  We've been working on the concept of think about something in your head and when you've done some good thinking and would like to share raise your hand.  They are starting to get it know which is great to give everyone enough time to think about the problem they are faced with.