Thursday, January 31, 2013

Dinosaurs - Tot School Thursday

There are some days that I just cannot wait for our troupe of toddlers to come through the front door.  Today was one of those days. We were all set up with dancing dinosaurs everywhere!  They all loved the dinosaur skeletons in the grits and corn meal sensory bin. 

 We made puzzles and played with the dinosaurs.  Lil'ManJ brought a dinosaur over to me and said, "Dinosaur eat." Then he took the dinosaur to the sensory bin and made him "eat" the "sand".  It was such a fun game!
 We even made dinosaurs with our creature builder set.




 Playing with the Dancing Dinosaurs Tot Pack.




 We sorted upper and lower case letter D dinosaurs from Confessions of a Homeschooler.







 We also played with the dinosaur and lizard hand puppets.


 The letter D on Starfall.com
 These were some happy kids! (and I was one happy teacher!)

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Dinosaurs! Wednesday Preschool

You can't talk about the letter D without talking about dinosaurs!  We had so much fun exploring different dinosaurs and reading dinosaur books.  Each child came home with a dinosaur name puzzle to practice spelling their name.  Encourage them to play it at home with you. 

 We are becoming readers and it is so exciting to be a part of all these kids lives!




 We made some really fun dinosaurs in art time.  We cut out the dinosaur shapes (pre-traced) from green paper.  Then we glued them onto white paper and added hand prints as the dinosaurs spikes.
 We also make dinosaur feet out of foam crafting sheets.


 In the afternoon we continued our focus on long vowel a.
 Preschool B loves playing on Starfall.com on the SmartBoard and there are so many different games on it that it grows along with our growing knowledge.
 OB from the morning class practices walking with his new dinosaur feet :)
 We dig into our encyclopedias almost every day.  Most days we look through it to learn more about topics that interest us.  Today we went hunting with highlighter tape in hand for long a words.

 The home made silly putty only lasts for a few weeks, so we pulled it out again at the end of the day.






Monday, January 28, 2013

Dancing with Letter D - Monday Preschool

On Monday morning we learned about the letter D and dancing.  First we needed to read a few books about dancing.  Then we needed to pull out all the dance costumes and get busy dancing. 

 Tracing the letter D on our sandpaper letter cards.
 Reading the letter D book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.
 Today we decided to do some water color painting and the pictures turned out beautifully!


 Making AB patterns with two colored counters.


 A little dance break...
 Making AB patterns with unifix cubes.

 Preschool B is off into a new adventure.  We're learning all about long vowels and digraphs (wh, ch, sh, th) for the next few months.  Monday was our first adventure with long A in a CVCe pattern.  We did really well in our trial runs sounding out the words and remembering that the e on the end kicks the a to say its name.


 The costumes were still out from the morning class and became a fun part of the afternoon as well.
 We really needed to bake something today since we learned that the word "Bake" has a long a in it.  The boys decided that cookies were the way to go!
 At the end of the day we played with home made silly putty.  I didn't actually make it, but it's about a 2 to 1 ratio of liquid glue and liquid starch.  It makes a very interesting texture that is super fun to play with.