Writing Workshop Takes Off in Preschool!

We had such a fun day of school today.  I'm very impressed with the writing we are producing already.  Today we had a nearly complete actual story about Batman.  It had a cover, a beginning, and a middle.  We talked about how fun it was to listen to the story and how we hoped that the last page would be worked on during our next class to finish the story.  Being able to create a story line in writing form is very difficult and it's so fun to see it emerging already!  I am impressed with the attempts to sound words out and add them to our books.

Sharing what we did as authors today.

 We continued working on reviewing the alphabet today.  We added the letter "G" which we practiced by opening our mouths really big and making the /g/ sound at the back of our throats.  Through our interest led reading books and our decodable "Now I'm Reading" sets we had plenty of practice with the letter G.  We're continuing our graphing conversation in math using the books we read aloud each day.  Today we read three books that all had "Moon" in the title.  It was fun to talk about our favorite story out of the three and "vote" to make our graph.

Passionate Reading and Writing in Preschool

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!  On Tuesday in preschool we used a loved classic to work on reading the word "and" as we reviewed the letter D.  We talked in great depth about how we don't write or color in books at the library, books at home, or books at Miss Amanda's house.  However, they were being gifted a special book where they had permission to highlight all of the words they know how to read in the story.  We read through the story together, highlighted the words we knew, and then read the story again...maybe even two more times.  The kids were so excited about their own books and a story many of them already loved.

 We also read two other story books and used all three read alouds from the day to make a graph of which story we liked the most.

 Yes, I really do teach kids to write this way.  In the bottom left picture you'll see how we worked on sounding out the following words: family, dump truck, Dora, Hello Kitty, villains, dinosaurs, dragons, and dino trucks.  We "grab" the word in the air and then slowly "stretch" it to find out what sounds we should write next (imagine grabbing bread dough and then stretching it long and thin).  We are not looking for accuracy in spelling here.  These guys are 4 years old, and even at 5 and 6 years old phonetic spelling is perfectly acceptable.  After we spoke in great deal about how to write words we continued our work on writing our very own books.  A few kids decided to start new books and the rest continued working on the book they started last week.  We have some great authors!  Encourage this phonetic spelling at home!

Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!  A few kids pointed out that today was in fact not Valentine's day.  However, since we don't have school on Saturday we celebrated it today!  This morning was a blast learning about the letter U.  We used a big balloon with a capital U and a small balloon with a lower case u to practice the /u/ sound.  We made the balloon go /u/ /u/ /u/ - UP! and then tossed it to another student to repeat the action.  We also talked about all the words in the mini U book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We talked about the family of frogs in the book and acted out all the actions that they do throughout the book.  After snack time each child got a box of heart candies to sort and graph.  We practiced one-to-one counting and determining which color and the most and the least. 

 After math we handed out Valentines to our friends with our decorated Valentine bags and then did a letter review game with balloons.  Each balloon had a letter on it.  The idea of the game was to look at the letter on the balloon and then sing the song about the letter name and sound ("N says /n/, N says /n/, every letter makes a sound, N says /n/").

 This afternoon we read a fun story called "The Day it Rained Hearts".  It's a simple and sweet story about a little girl making Valentine cards out of hearts that rained from the sky. Each child then drew their favorite part and added words to their drawing.  We then took turns sharing our work with the whole class.

 We did our regular guided reading groups today so everyone has 2 new baggy books to be reading.   For math we repeated our lesson from last Wednesday about units and sticks of 10.  Then we got out our math cards and paired up to play the matching game.  PLEASE play this game LOTS at home!

We had a great time playing outside for a bit.  Cheering for kids who completed Ready2Read units, coloring Valentine bags and handing out our Valentines.  It was a great day!

Ocean Animals and Interest Led Learning

What a wonderful day of school!  Today we learned all about the letter J this morning with our Ocean Animals theme.  We used the phonics headbands from the Moffatt Girls and added "tentacles" to the back of them.  It was so much fun to dance around as jelly fish.  We worked on reading the letter J and the J book.  We also spent some time going back to the beginning and reading together all the mini readers.  It seems that a couple of kids are stuck at about the B book.  When you are working on reading at home please back up and read the books that your child is attempting with most success and leave the other letter books (with more letters) for study later.  Next we worked on art, coloring J the Jellyfish and adding tentacles to her.  We also drew our favorite sea animals and practiced writing our names.  In math we continued graphing.  It was a super fun day!

 Preschool B had an interest led day today.  We started with our encyclopedias and each found a topic that was interesting.  I then pulled out kid books on the same topic to give them a larger browsing library.  We worked in our Ready2Read (congrats to the kids who passed of Level 1 Unit 4) and we worked with the letter G.  Make sure when your child is reading the g book that they make the /g/ sound in their throat.  For art we drew and wrote about what we had looked at in reading time.  There were space themes, animal themes, transportation themes and knights and dragons.  We spent our math time building shapes and building with shapes.  It was wonderful!

Sharing and Manners

Today was a great day learning all about sharing and manners.  We had a review of letters in the morning and the kids are doing fantastic!  We started the day playing with puzzles.  If your child struggles with 12 piece puzzles I'd highly suggest getting a couple for Christmas and practicing with your child.  Being able to put a puzzle together is a problem solving skill that needs to be learned.  We simply don't have enough time to practice enough in school.  We had a blast fishing for letters during our review.  Once a letter was caught we sang the "Every Letter Makes a Sound" song for that letter and then put it back for someone else to catch.  We enjoyed art time drawing pictures in our notebooks and working on a secret art craft that turned our toes green!  We learned about graphing in math today.  It was an introduction that used hats as the example.  We only wear our own hats and they have to go right on top of our head or they will fall off if we put them up too high.  They did great for a first introduction!  We also played "Motorboat" for music time talking about the tempo of music, boy did they love that!

 This afternoon we also talked about sharing and manners.  Our focus, however was the letter N and naughty behaviors.  We learned the sight word "no" and read the book "No, David!"  We talked about N the naughty newt painting with nail polish and then had a chance to paint with nail polish in our notebooks (yes, my house is still stinky)!  We also worked on a secret art project that turned our toes green.  That should wash off quickly :).

Pumpkin Day

We had SO MUCH FUN this morning with our pumpkins theme.  We started the day playing with pumpkin pie play dough and though it was very sticky it was a hit!  Then everyone got to pick their own pumpkin.  We washed it in the sink and then drew all over it with markers.  The fun aspect of doing that with washable markers is that you can easily wipe it off and start decorating all over again!

 We also did investigations with our pumpkins.  We cut open one large pumpkin to investigate the parts of the pumpkin (and play with the guts!).  We took turns measuring the height, circumference and weight of each pumpkin.  Then we had to see if each pumpkin would sink or float (a great way to wash off the marker so they can go home clean).

 We practiced finding the word "the" in our poem about 5 Little Pumpkins and then we danced and sung along to the song.

 Preschool B started the afternoon in two groups.  One group played Starfall Speedway with me and the other group worked on 38 piece puzzles. I love the Starfall Speedway game.  It has 4 different games in one so you can tailor it to match the needs of the child(ren) you are playing with.  You can work on letter names and sounds, sounding out CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) 3 letter words and you can work on more difficult words that include digraphs and consonant blends.  The kids love playing it and we are able to work on the one-to-one counting and turn taking aspects of playing a game.  I think we'll play this game more often now that I remember how much we all love it.

We also worked on our letter I beginning reader book from the Amazing Action Alphabet today.  That's a tricky one with that tricky 4 letter word: "sits".  Another reading group started Ready2Read Level 1 Unit 1 today.  I was so proud of them being able to move forward in their reading, they're getting it!  For our themes today each student picked a page from their encyclopedia and we worked one-on-one to mark the words they could read.  I'd encourage you to read this way through the whole page with them.  You could even pick other pages to do over the weekend and through next week if you like (no encyclopedia work in school next week).

 We continued our work on graphing today.  We pulled out the scissors and cut and glue pages.  I was proud of them for getting the hang of graphing so quickly.

 We're starting to branch out into our preschool B art format of picking what we'd like to do each day.  Today it was suggested that we paint so out came the water color paints.  They had such a great time mixing colors and making designs all over their page.

Doctors and Graphing

We had so much fun being doctors this morning.  H the horse needs help from a doctor so we practiced our skills.  Many of us were covered in the nearly 250 band-aids that we used up this morning.  Thank goodness the kids were such great helpers at cleaning up all the garbage!

 We did a few different activities for art today.  We worked on the H the horse maze from the Amazing Action Alphabet, we made doctor charts and marked our height and weight, and we did an eye dropper on coffee filters art.  It was such a blast!

 We had one of my favorite math lessons this morning.  We talked about above/over and below/under.  It's the one day that I tell them to stand on a table or chair and they think they've won the lottery! We do it over and over.  I say, "Make your body be OVER a table or chair." They all scramble to a new location and we raise our hand over our heads and say "Over! Over!" Then repeat with under/below and above.  So much fun!

 This afternoon was awesome!  We had great reading lessons and even got a jump start in learning the sight word "my".  Our math was so much fun because we quickly reviewed all of Comparing and Classifying objects and were able to move on to graphing.

 We practiced our cutting today by making "spider webs" or anything each child wanted to make out of coffee filters.  We finished up our lessons early enough that we spent the last 10 minutes outside.  Wasn't the weather beautiful?

Winter Holidays

We had a fantastic day in preschool today.  We reviewed the letters we've already learned this year and then spent our literacy block picture reading books and doing some one-on-one quick assessments to judge where were are at this point in the year.  You can find my preschool assessment in the "A Year in Review" Pack on Teacher's Notebook.

We spent the rest of the day learning about Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas and New Year's.  We practiced rolling dice and graphing snowmen, singing winter holiday songs and reading stories galore. Have a great break everyone!  We'll see you in the new year!

Don't forget to swing by and enter to win the Jan-May Preschool Curriculum!

Winter

Today in Little Adventures Preschool we learned about Winter!  I had some puzzles out for them to start with, and after chatting with a mom and returning to the preschool I found all the pieces on the floor!  It was amazing how quickly the kids raced to put all the pieces back in where they belong.

 After reading a book about seasons that focused on winter we took our month cards and put them in order talking about the seasons in the pictures for that month.  Once we got to the end we took the cards from the top one at a time to add them to the bottom.

We've been working on a few sight words and some basic words, so I created this graph for the kids who were recognizing the words. Download the graph {here}.  We read a book whole group and stopped when we found a word we knew.

 We used this cute mobile pattern from Itsy Bitsy Printables for our art project.

 All the kids are adorable, but isn't J just the most adorable in this picture?

 I loved that I decided to "trace" the letters.

 I pointed the tracing out and it caught on with a few more kids.

 After they were done coloring they got to paint the glue on their pages and add glitter!

 Playing Hop Along the Path from my Winter Math Pack.

I've put the snowflakes on my floor with clear contact paper, and the kids picture on the fridge the same way.  The snowballs all have magnets on the back and kids hop around on the path to deliver the snowballs to make a snowman on the fridge.  We are in the very beginning stages of this game.  We're working on counting out loud one number per jump all the way to the fridge.  As we improve our math skills we'll roll a dice to figure out how many jumps to move forward.  You could even roll two dice and add them together to find out how far to move!  If you wanted to also have some subtraction, roll two different colored dice and subtract one number from the other to find out how far you should move - watch out for those negative numbers though!

 We also played the winter grid game from my Winter Math Pack.

Be sure to enter our book giveaway!  Entries close tonight, with a winner being announced tomorrow!

Animals in Winter

Today in Little Adventures Preschool we talked about what animals do in winter. We started by talking about winter and what people do to get ready for winter.  We made this fun graph with all the kids faces to identify what types of clothing everyone had.



Then, we talked about what animals migrate and what that means.  We used the do-a-dot painters to paint some butterflies.

 Snack time is an important time to learn new skills.  I was very focused on pouring her water.  Of course there are messes every day, but that's part of growing up!

 Next we learned about animals that hibernate in winter.  I didn't get any good pictures of that.  Lastly, we learned about animals that adapt in winter.  All the animals that we talked about are brown in the summer (to match the dirt) and white in the winter (to match the snow).

 When our book was finished we used crayons to find the word 'the'.  Here A astounded me by finding the word 'the' in together!

 Some of us are still working on recognizing the word the, and the twins have an excuse since they started after the 'the' lesson :)

We didn't get to the printables that I started creating (grid and short path math games).  If you'd like to download them click this link here: Animals in Winter Math Games