Feelings

I LOVE the feelings theme in preschool.  It's such an important topic and there are so many fantastic resources!

Preschool A homework today includes 3 mini pre-reader books.  Simply cut them into fourths and staple them together.  Read them to your child while you demonstrate the skills that good readers do (look, point, say sounds, listen).  Read it over and over and your child will soon "read" it back to you.  Acting like a reader is the first step to reading success.  So, yes, even though they are memorizing the pages it is important to encourage it and go through the process with them!

 Today we looked at the different emotions and faces we make with mirrors.  We used our mirrors to help us find the letter M around the room and we watched a fun little video of The Count counting different emotions.  We talked about how colors can represent emotions and then finger painted with the two colors that seemed to fit our moods.

 We had fun playing with the emotion bean bags and bowls, matching colors and emotions.  We practiced our beginning handwriting with our Amazing Action Alphabet handwriting notebook.  Continue to practice the correct holding of a writing tool at home!  We also had tons of fun talking about how many fingers we have on each hand.  Believe it or not, many in this class didn't know how many and needed to count.  Sometimes our count got off before we got to 5.  Help them count their fingers over the next few days to make sure we point at one finger and say "one" the next finger while we say "two" and so forth.  We're trying to get the one-to-one correspondence counting more consistent.

This afternoon we had quite a delightful preschool B.  We had fun reading and hunting for letters in our encyclopedias.  We talked about how people have feelings, but houses and chairs don't.  That's why we started with reading about people. We also had the opportunity to read books to our sock monkeys and work in small reading groups together.

 In math we talked about ordinal numbers.  It's a tricky concept, but I think they've almost got it.  "First" is an easy idea because we use it all the time in our every day vocabulary.  Getting to second and third is fairly okay.  "Fourth" and "fifth" are harder to understand.

We also watched a movie today.  It is Kira Willey's "Colors" video.  It was fun to watch the lyrics on the screen and see the kids point out the word "the".  We also painted with two colors indicating our emotions and then wrote and drew about it.  I was impressed that nearly everyone was holding their pencil correctly.  We had such a fun day! I apologize about the slightly stained hands.  I promise I bought the washable paint,  It certainly doesn't seem that washable though!