Fruit - Preschool Wednesday

Today we got to talk about Fruit.  And, what better way than to start with fruity smelling play-dough?

 Counting the "snakes" he made.

 Here we were practicing the /v/ sound while pretending to push vacuums :)

 Our shared reading on the SMARTBoard today, and now that I think of it, I forgot to send home the V book.  Oops.  This beginning reader is one from the set of Amazing Action Alphabet books.  I love how the books build upon each other and don't introduce any advanced phonics or sight words like so many of the other beginning reader books.

 We sorted the fruit and vegetable cards today according to fruits and vegetables.

 Then everyone had to pick the picture of their favorite fruit and tell us what it is called.

 For snack time we enjoyed a variety of different fruits.

 Here is art before it was handed out.  A few different essential oils, water with food coloring to match and some eye droppers with coffee filters.

 They really enjoyed making their fruity smelling art, and it is great fine motor development.

 Today's number is 4!  Remember to keep working on your number homework books at home each day.  We enjoyed playing with the TouchMath Textured Numerals today.

 We've also started learning our songs for the preschool program at the end of May.  They did great and it was only the first time I'd introduced the songs to them today.

 In afternoon preschool we've taken on a large challenge, representing numbers using manipulatives.  It sounds all vague and relatively easy, but any number more than 9 enters new territory for these preschoolers: place value. We started the day doing some free explore of quantity blocks.

 Then we pulled out all the rods and cubes.  We needed to find out how many cubes equaled one rod.  (The answer was 10).

 We talked about if we wanted to represent large numbers we'd have a mess of cubes and counting the rods as 10 would help us.  Then we needed to represent a number that wasn't a multiple of 10. Counting the rod as 10 and then adding on, "11, 12, 13" is a HUGE leap.  Up till now we've counted by 10's (10, 20, 30, etc.) and now I'm asking them to count by 10's and then count by 1's to add all the cubes.

 I failed to rotate this picture and blogger won't let me, but the next step in representing numbers with manipulatives is being able to identify what the numeral represents.  The number 13 has a 1 to represent 1 rod of 10 and a 3 to represent 3 cubes.  We made great learning strides today, but this concept is still very murky in these young minds.  We'll keep working on it though.

 Next, they were each given a set of cards.  Each set contained the numerals 1-20 and picture images of base 10 blocks for each number.  They were instructed to match the numeral with its correct picture and then put the numbers in order.  It was interesting how all 3 of them went about this project in completely different ways.
There was putting the numerals in order to start with...

 Spreading all the cards on the floor and picking them at random to set on the table in pairs...

 And there was the strategy of hold them all in a pile and look through them until matches were found.
 In the end they were all successful with plenty of help along the way.  What I learned today is that even though they can count well and identify numbers well it is challenging for each of them to identify numbers out of order and they don't have a frame of reference for what the numbers represent in quantity. So, that's what we'll be working on.

 We continued our R-Controlled vowels with the book "Surfer Girl" at the end of the day. Keep up all the hard work at home, we're learning lots here at school and your reinforcement at home helps us learn even more!