Bucket Filling Reading Friends

What an awesome day of preschool we had!  It was absolutely amazing!  We started our day off reading "How Full is Your Bucket? for Kids".  I LOVED reading this with our class.  We had great discussions about how we can't see our bucket or other's buckets but we can feel them with our emotions.  It's similar to not being able to see air, but when you blow on your hand you can feel it.  We added the words "Bucket Fillers" and "Friends" to our "Who We Are" chart hanging on the wall.  As we continue to broaden the language we can use to describe ourselves we keep adding to the chart.

 Next we had a fantastic lesson about blending sounds.  Many of the kids know all of their letter names and sounds and we are all ready to master the blending aspect of putting words together.  We worked through the first few books of the Amazing Action Alphabet together.  These are a great tool for beginning readers.  Even the kids who can read most of the words almost instantly are able to learn and practice the act of blending sounds into words.

We really focused on blending the first sound into the second one.  Another way to phrase that is to "not stop the first sound until your mouth is making the second sound."  We spent many a moment laughing hysterically at Miss Amanda's impression of a robot reading.  Just in case you were wondering, teaching a robot to read is REALLY HARD!  However, teaching a PERSON to read when they can blend one sound into the next is super easy! Note to parents: YES, it will still take A LOT of time for your new reader to be fluently reading chapter books.  However, celebrate the blending today and continue working on it!

I put together a little video of how I want the kids to read their Amazing Action Alphabet books from the Baggy Book.  Please be kind - it's not a professional movie.  (See this type of lesson in action from last year here.)  It's amazing how using the strategy of blending each word slowly, then saying it quickly, then rereading the whole sentence fluently sets kids up for successful reading strategies in the future.

Mid reading lesson we got our wiggles out by "Dancing the Robots out of us" to some robot music and sharing about our teddy bears and their names with our classroom buddies.  The teddy bear name thing connects to the Letter B book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We went through all of these readers last year with these kids as 3 year olds and this year we're  reviewing them in quite a speedy manner.

 After our incredibly successful reading lesson we only had 15 minutes of our class time left together so we spent it enjoying each other's company and playing with blocks and trucks.  It was amazing to watch these kids light up when they blended the sounds together and successfully read a word.  I loved it!

Animal Friends and Reading

This morning was so much fun playing with our Animal Friends theme!  We read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" which is a perfect text to read the word "at".  We also read "Big Red Barn" and found all of the a's.  We had tons of fun coloring our A watches from the Moffatt Girls, playing on Starfall.com and working on our Amazing Action Alphabet activity page and handwriting page.

In math we had oodles of fun learning about MORE and LESS.  We watched a few short clips of Sesame Street characters explaining the concept and then got to work on our game.  This is a great activity to encourage identifying more and less.  If you don't have flip chips you can easily spray paint one side of a poker chip and achieve the same affect.

On Monday we had a monumental reading lesson in our morning class.  Today's monumental reading lesson was in the afternoon class.  The morning class will get this lesson in about 3 weeks, though it'll be a year long lesson.  It was such an awesome lesson that I have no pictures.  But I do have a video to walk you through it.  The video is 9 minutes in length but shows you the key parts of our reading lesson.  Please watch it to know how to support your reader at home or, if you are a teacher, watch to see the strategy I teach in my classroom.  (The video was too large and had to be split into two sections, find both below.)

In math we learned the rules to the game Compare. This game is identical to the card game "War" but sounds much nicer to call it "Compare".  Using a set of 20 cards each with a quantity of stickers 1-10 (done twice to make twenty cards) we split the deck evenly.  Each player turns over their top card at the same time and the person with more stickers gets to take both cards.  Continue play until your deck is gone.  Then pick up the cards you "won" and repeat.  This is a fantastic game to be playing at home!

Preschool B enjoyed drawing and writing with colored pencils today and we had a fantastic time doing the "Freeze Dance" during music.  It was a great week of learning!