Preschool Manners

Preschool Manners was so much fun to teach today.  Our letter of the week continues to be letter M.  We started the day off by making these awesome headbands from the Moffatt Girls. They feature the letter M with 3 different initial m images (mouse, monkey, money).

 We read a few different manners books and the kids each held up a happy face sign if the character was doing something that made them feel happy or a sad face sign if they were doing something that made them feel sad.  Check out the manners preschool printable for these printables and more!

 I was so excited to introduce our first reading book to Preschool A today.  It is such an exciting day to show kids the very beginning steps of reading.  It is very important to point to every letter that you are sounding out.  It's also important to make the sound of the letter and not say the letter name when you are trying to read a word.  The M book from the Amazing Action Alphabet only has the letter M in it.  So we point to each M and say /m/.  It is a great slow start to some key skills of reading.  If you haven't checked out their beginning readers yet I'd highly recomend them.

 After reading the book in its super large version on the SmartBoard together each boy got their own reading book.  (Yes, we had only boys today.  One gal is out of town for the first 3 weeks of school, and the other was out sick today, insert sad face here.)

 These foam fingers are a great way to introduce pointing to each letter that you're reading.  Something about oversizing what you're doing makes it really stick out as an important skill to do each time you open a book.

 For art today we did the M the Moose artwork from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

 We also made a manners photography book.  JN and OB were so polite when they were done with their coloring that they had the opportunity to be the photographers for this activity.  The other three boys were the actors.  They had to act out different manners for our the book that we were making.  It turned out very cute.  There is a template in the Preschool Manners Pack.

 We learned the song and a few signs to "Magic Words" from Signing Time. Head on over to a preview of the video and have your child sing along to you.

 We worked on "Equal" means "The Same" in math today.  We are working on making equal sets of objects.  This photo shows a page from the Touch Math PreK curriculum.  The fingers showed how many objects someone wanted and we had to color in an equal set.

 

Our afternoon preschool is such a new format that I'm still getting used to it, but the kids are loving it.  We start our day planning which order we'll do things.  Today RS jumped right in and organized our day, she even remembered that snack has to come second to last.  CF wanted to make one change to the agenda and everyone agreed that it looked great.  They decided so quickly, it was great!  Our first order of buisness: Music.  They had decided that dancing and playing rhythm sticks would be the best for today.  Jam pack the next 5 minutes with motion galore! 

 We worked more on word families today.  We've been working on the word family -at since Monday last week.  Today I introduced the word family -an.  We can tap out the sounds and read already!  We've also worked on the first 5 sight words: a, I, and, the, see.

 We continue to use the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read level one to work on our word families and sight words.

 A couple of the kids in preschool B didn't get the chance to come last year and will be doing the Amazing Action Alphabet Begining Reader Books for the first half of the year.  They are picking up the idea of reading quickly and are reading quality books that are meeting their needs.

CJ and AT have gone through the whole Amazing Action Alphabet book series and are working more exclusively on books that feature our word families. Last week they were reading the Now I'm Reading Level 1 Book 1 and today we started reading book 2 of the Bob Books Set 1.  (We read book 1 as a review in our reading group time, but they read that last spring)  I got a couple of copies of the Bob books in the large size from Costco for a great deal, if you're planning on working with your child on reading at home I'd highly suggest to purchase them there.

 Matching words to their pictures from Ready2Read.

 Art today was watercolor painting.  We had EMan and AT's little sister join us during art time (EMan had just woken up from nap and little sister gets to hang at my house with mom during preschool time).  After painting we got out the markers to write about our drawings.  Earlier in the day we had a writing time where we talked about the lines on lined paper and how the capital letters reach the top and the lowercase letters just go between the middle line and the bottom line.  This concept transfered over to their art writing as I saw them start to explore the writing lines a little more purposefully.

 We talked about more, less and equal today in math.  We might need to touch on this a little bit more next week before we move on to ordinal numbers.

 We finally got to make and eat our carrot fries today!

 Since we had snack late (due to the baking time) we had about 5 minutes of extra time before pick up.  It wasn't worth pulling out another activity, so the train set came out for some exploration.  We had a lot of great learning time today and I look forward to watching these kids grow and learn this year!