Animal Friends - Wednesday Preschool

Today we had such a blast in preschool!  Everyone left with knowledge filled heads and energy drained bodies :)  We were animals all day long!

We made the egg carton ants and learned about apples, animals, and all things letter A. 

I am completely thrilled with the work that my small group did in Preschool B today. We added a couple new words to our sight word caterpillar: "up" and "look".  I love the sight word caterpillar created by The Moffatt Girls because it really gives ownership to the students learning the words by having them write the words.  RS even added eyelashes to the two O's in "look" to help us remember what the word said.

 We worked all afternoon on the sound that short "i" makes.  It seems to be really tricky sound that is hard to remember.  The word family we started working on is -ig, so we used it ALL afternoon.  Each time we came to the short "i" I could see the wheels turning in their little heads as they scratch their arms trying to remember the beginning sound in the word "itch".  Hopefully with some parent enrichment over the weekend we'll have it down solid by Monday!

 Pigs doing jigs in wigs are really funny. Just sayin'. :)

 We had a really great writing experience today.  Each child was asked to do a drawing with text about what they are most interested in and studying.  Our concepts currently are: Space, Trucks, and Construction Trucks.

The idea of "student lined paper" is an interesting one.  We hardly ever use this specialty paper in real life, but it can be helpful with determining the size to write letters.  We talked about the top, bottom and middle lines.  Capital letters are like the "Mommy Letter" in the letter family, therefore they are tall and go all the way to the top blue line when they are standing on the red ground.  "Baby Letters" or lowercase letters are smaller.  Some are starting to grow tall enough to reach the top line, but they all have portions that only reach the middle line.  It's slightly confusing now that I'm writing it out, but I think it made sense to the kids at the time.

We worked together to stretch the sounds in words in order to write about our pictures.

 We did a few different things for art.  First up was an "I  Art" page from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

 I am mostly posting this picture so I can remember when my kids are grown how small and awesome they were.  EMan woke up from his nap in time to join us for this activity.  He loves using scissors and has mastered them at a relatively young age, due to the young age a few of his shirts have cuts in them, but that's a different story.  Today I pointed out that there were dotted lines around the insect and he could consider cutting on those lines.  This is the first time I've suggest to him HOW to cut something.  He did surprisingly well!

 Free art today included 3 items (picked by the kids).  Glue, glitter and markers.  It was an enjoyable time as they each focused on something that they felt was important.

 We've been working on comparisons so far this month.  Our focus has been on descriptive words.  We've talked these and more: tall/short, big/little, large/small, long/short

 Today I introduced a new one, not knowing if they'd ever thought about heavy/light before.  They got it right away.

 We had a lot of fun playing with the balloon and the hand weights.

I have a small balance board that worked great for comparing each other by weight.  They really loved the balance board activity and I think they've mastered the idea of comparing by weight.

 We'll move on to classifying objects in math next week.  We had a fantastic day and I love seeing my different groups of kids grow and learn from day to day and week to week.  Keep up the good work at home!