Bears and Bats - Monday

Bears and Bats is one of my favorite days to teach.  Actually, there are a number of awesome days that I love - this day is certainly one of them!  We started the day by painting toilet paper rolls black for bats or brown for bears.

 We learned the letter B and read lots of books about bats and bears to our teddy bears.

 I introduced the game "Making Words" for the first time and we had so much fun.  You can find the Bears and Bats Preschool Pack here and play the game at home. We're learning the alphabet in a very non-alphabetically specific order (m t a s b h c i l p f j o n d g u r k e w y v x z q) in order to teach kids how to use the alphabet while they are learning it.  It doesn't make sense to learn the symbols without a way to use them.  So far, we've learned M T A S B.  With these five letters we can make oodles of words.  We take our Making Words cards and mix them up to make "at" "sat" "mat" "am" "Sam" etc.  After I have the kids copy the word I've made they get to make up silly words on their own like "mts" or "bstm".  They think it is SO FUNNY and it's a fantastic way to make learning to read and sound out words fun.  It doesn't matter that they are nonsense words - they're reading!

 I also encourage kids to write the words down once they've made it with the cards.

 Another option for the making words card game is practicing the individual letter names and sounds.  Each card has a letter on the top and an image below it that starts with the letter, the T is a tiger by the way, not a cat :).  Kids that are struggling remembering the letter sound can say the name of the image, identify the beginning sound of the image and then they have the sound the letter makes.

 I'm starting to break into reading groups now.  I currently have 2 groups of 4 kids.  While I'm working with 4 kids at the green table the other 4 kids have activities that they are working on.  Quite often the activity is free reading of books relating to the theme of the day.

 We're starting to get into the season of limited fresh vegetables from the garden, so snack was rice cakes and almond butter - everyone enjoyed it!

 After snack we were able to continue making our paper towel bats and bears.

 We're learning a lot about liquid glue and how much we should use.  There is a reason the I have everyone provide a glue bottle and I still go through a minimum of a gallon of glue refill in the year.  The good aspect of that is that we learn how much glue to use in a non-threatening way.

 We're continuing our discussion about pitch in music and were able to explore the hand bells.

 At the end of the day we taught our Teddy Bears how to do somersaults.  We demonstrated them and then had our bears do them.  SO much fun!