Indians and Pilgrims - Wednesday Preschool

NOTE: This theme is meant as an introduction to Native Americans and Pilgrims. I have intentionally used the word Indian to introduce the letter I. Indian, however, is not an accurate description of Native Americans. For more information please see this link. There are also many different tribes of Native Americans that have very different traditions. Though the Pilgrims were in contact with the Wampanoag, this theme introduces ideas from many different tribes.

We started the day off with 12 piece puzzles and tracing the alphabet from the alphabet pages.

 CJ had a snuggle moment :)

 Then we rode on the Mayflower.  It was very crowded and 2 kids had to share 1 cushion.  We sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and then we came to land.

 We had to build our houses.

 We had an awesome lesson today all about words and sentences.  We learned that words make up sentences and have letters in them.  There is a space between words.  Each sentence ends with a period that tells us to stop because it is the end of the sentence.

 Then we "met" the Indians and did a Friendship Dance.

 Snack time was super yummy with apples, crackers and yogurt as a dip.

 For art today we painted with feathers.

 Corn was a key grain for the Pilgrims and Native Americans.  We scooped and measured corn.  It was only clean when we were first starting...

 Now a little bit messier!  Thank you to the parents for helping us clean it up after!

 Preschool B started out as usual.  We decided what we would do for the day and in what order.

 We sorted word family words.

 And looked through recipe books for a great snack idea.

 I pulled out some sight word dice and we practiced rolling them and reading the words on them.

 We also played with the word machine on Starfall.com

 We practiced our sight words more with homemade word blocks and a 9 square grid, a form of Bingo.  When I make homemade dice I just use wood cubes from our block collection (we have about a zillion) and a thin permanent marker to write words or draw dots, etc.

 When a word was rolled they got to mark the word with a candy.  When they had all their words covered they got to eat the candy.

 Art and writing was combined today.  I always feel like they don't have enough time for art and writing so we left their notebooks out and when we were working after snack they could go back and work more on them.

 For snack we made pancakes!  I don't get pictures of some of the awesome fun we have because it's so messy and I'm so focused on making the activity work (like making a batch of pancakes with kids).  You'll just have to trust me that it was fun!

 We did a review of circles, squares and triangles today.  We talked about straight versus round edges, corners and points and different attributes like size.

 RS wanted to show off her art and writing at the end of the day. "Mushroom and a Big Flower"