Earth Day

This morning in preschool A we had a great time learning about plants.  And how fitting that it fell on Earth Day.  We talked about the parts of plants that we eat (a review) and then had oranges for snack time.  I love having the preschoolers peel their own oranges.  They feel so proud of themselves when they are successful.

 After snack we dissected seeds.  The key to this is to soak large beans (I use large white beans) overnight and then let the kids take them apart. There is the skin, the food (cotyledon), and the baby plant inside each seed.  It's fun to let them discover this.  Then we moved on to art where we made pictures of plants and labeled them with their parts.

At the end of the day we reviewed numeral 7 and introduced numeral 8 on the TouchMath app.

This afternoon we had a fantastic lesson about reading strategies.  We talked about how we're really good at all the things that good readers do (look, point, listen, say sounds).  Now we need strategies to help us when words are harder than the basic phonics we know.  Each child now has a flip book of reading strategies in their baggy book to help them when they get stuck.  If they ask you what a word is in their book turn the question back to them and ask what strategies they have used to try and figure it out.

 Our reading lesson moved into a lesson about cement patios as the cement truck (finally) pulled up and there was a group of men working on pouring a patio in the back.

We continued our lessons with work on decomposing numbers and counting to 100.  We're working on writing numbers to 100 and then counting to 100 by tens.