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.

Fruits

Preschool A had a fun morning learning all about fruit.  We sorted fruit by color, picked our favorites and added them to our journals.  We practiced our letter V and the funny lip vibration sound it makes.  We had fruit for snack time and many kids tried kiwi fruit for the first time.  Yum!

 We had a great time learning the numeral 4 and practicing counting the TouchPoints on the TouchMath app.  It's an easy way to visually and physically count representations to remember the numeral.  We also spent the last 15 minutes playing outside in the lovely weather, I love this time of year!

 This afternoon we started outside but it got too chilly and we came in to continue our work in comfort.  We read some of "Pippi Longstocking" and had fun conversations about all the silly things she does.  We drew and wrote about our favorite parts of the story in our journals.

 We also continued our work on our Constructing Numbers game.  It went home as homework - PLEASE play it at home AND RETURN it on WEDNESDAY (mud and worms Monday, so keep it a couple extra days to practice).  We'll add numbers 51-99 for kids who are ready for it on Wednesday.  We also worked on our guided reading groups and Ready2Read lessons.

Planting Seeds, Constructing Numbers and Enjoying Spring

I LOVE when the Planting Seeds theme falls on a warm spring day.  It makes it so much nicer for me to clean up.  We spent the morning cutting out pictures from seed catalogs and gluing them in our notebooks.  We also used liquid glue to make seed pictures and we practiced our letters on the big outdoor chalkboards.

 We got VERY muddy when we got to work planting our very own pea plants.  We had to squish the soil with the water and then fill our little pots with it.  Then we planted our peas and enjoyed playing in the yard.

 This afternoon we spent a chunk of time learning about our "Constructing Numbers" game.  It's a download from differentiatedkindergarten.blogspot.com and I LOVE using it with my 4 year old class.  There are cards with the numerals on it and hidden pictures of the blocks.  The kids make their representation of the numerals in the tens and ones boxes and then can self check to see if they made it correctly by lifting the flap.

 We then were able to go outside and do our group reading lesson of "Biscuit in the Garden".  We love reading Biscuit books and I'm so proud of these kids for being able to read the majority of the book by themselves.  We had a little time at the end and the kids created "Rainbow Power" where they got power by putting chalk on their skin.  I had stepped inside to put books in folders and came back to colorful children.  What fun!