I Am Special

First off, THANK YOU to all the wonderful families of Little Adventures Preschool.  Yesterday was a busy day learning about the program that CJ gets to attend on Monday's and I appreciate the willingness to allow the one time change to school being on Tuesday.

Today we had a blast learning the letter M.  We talked, sang, danced, and traced letter M.  We learned all about M the Moose and how he just loves his Meatballs!  Be sure to grab the flip chart and review letter M at home with your preschooler.  Also, take out the alphabet cards (they were in the binder, PLEASE take them out) and display letter M somewhere.  I added magnets to the back and stuck them on a whiteboard.  Do what works for you!

 We also made fun phonics headbands from the Moffatt Girls.  The kids loved wearing the headband/crown all day.  For art we traced over our names with a paintbrush and glue and added glitter to them.  It was a fun and sparkly activity!  We spent lots of time talking about our "Star Student" posters.  We talked about how everyone is unique and special.  We had fun finding out favorite colors and how many people are in each family.  We hung the posters up in our classroom and will return them in a few weeks.

 We practiced the sign language for letter M and had an introduction to hand bells lesson.  Boy were those loved!  Check out our facebook page for a fun video.

This afternoon we got closer to being settled in to a groove.  I'm still sorting out the details of what each child needs, but we're really close!  We had a fantastic time listening as each child shared about themselves on their posters.  They talked about the photos and the pictures they drew and it was fun to compare favorite colors.  We read our new book "The Day the Sheep Came" and worked on highlighting letters and words we could recognize in the book.  It's a fun story about how the sheep is a different animal, but they are all barnyard animals and like to play together.  It tied in nicely with our conversation about how each of us is special.  We worked in our reading teams today for small group lessons.  Please check your child's binder for the homework.  There aren't any worksheets, but there are reading books.  You should be reading each book 3 times a night.  Please focus on the letters we've already talked about in class (M, T, A, and possibly S, B).  Help your child remember their names and sounds by reading the flip chart story and supplementing with anything else you have at home. PLEASE take the flip charts out of the binders and keep them at home.  We don't need them here and they are in the way in the binder.

We had an AWESOME lesson in math today.  It simply didn't get photographed :(.  We talked about the word "SAME" in relation to quantities.  It took a theatrical teacher, but I think they finally got to the point that we all agreed that 1 is the same as 1, 2 is the same as 2, 3 is the same as 3, and so forth.  Then our new vocabulary word "EQUAL" came into play.  We patted our legs as we chanted, "Equal means the same" over and over.  Ideally, tomorrow we can build off that concept and talk about more and less.  It's a fun lesson to do with the kids, they always love it.
We also got to do glitter for art today.  I wrote the kids names on word strips and they traced the letters with glue and added glitter.  Music was quite interesting today as they were allowed to play with all the musical toys we have and they formed their own band.  It was fun to watch as they organized themselves to "play" and "be quite" at the same time.  What smart kids!