Tot School - Sept 19 - Animals

I loved learning about the letter A and talking about animals at Tot School when we met on Sept 19th.  We started with playing outside as we have been doing for many weeks past.  We played with animal hand puppets and animal finger puppets.  After we washed our hands and had our snack we played downstairs for the rest of our time together.

 We're transitioning to spending part of our time inside and part of our time outside so when the weather is crummy the kids aren't surprised by a different play location.  We did animal puzzles, practiced the letter A book and colored it, and played with all sorts of toys!

Families

We had such a fun day today learning about families.  We were reviewing the letters M T and A today in our morning class.  I used a company called Create Jigsaw Puzzles to have each child's family picture made into a professional puzzle.  They turned out so fantastic!  Each child has their puzzle as homework.  Keep them at home and do them over and over again.  The minimum goal by the end of the 3 year old preschool year is to be able to do a 12 piece puzzle.

 We had fun with our reading lesson today practicing being a blender (like the video from last week).  We are practicing words like: at, am, mat, tam.  We talked about 'tam' being a nonsense word that isn't real but fun to read.  In math we started talking about ordinal numbers.  We talked about first, second and third.  At home point out different situations like: Mom will be served fish for dinner first, Daddy second and EMan third.  It was fun to watch the 3 year olds explore drawing people.  Some have been drawing people for a while and others are brand new to the idea.  We talked about the different shapes that make up bodies and how to draw them.

Our afternoon 4 year old class got much bigger puzzles.  Unfortunately the options available are pretty much 12 pieces or 100 pieces so we jumped to the big size. This is a REALLY big challenge that kids sometimes don't master until they are 5, 6 or even 7 years old.  Practice with them at home to make your fun family photo puzzle.

We had a great reading lesson with the letter S this afternoon.  We are continuing the strategies from the video posted last week.  Sound out each word slowly, reread the word quickly, move to the next word.  At the end of the sentence go back and reread the whole sentence quickly.  This strategy may seem very repetitive right now, but the books get much harder in the next few weeks and we'll benifit from practicing this way.  Some of our afternoon kids are working on the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read level 1 and are just about done with unit 1.  We're excited to move into the next word families!  We're still working on mastering counting one-to-one in preschool.  Today we played with the pattern blocks while counting.  We also built towers, forests, dragons and other cool things with the shapes.

We had a great day of learning!  I look forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday!

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!

Opposites and Animal Friends

We had a fantastic day in preschool today learning all about the letter A.  In our morning class we talked all about opposites.  We talked about black/white, wet/dry, hard/soft and many other opposites.  Start pointing out opposites to your preschooler throughout your daily life. As we started learning about the letter A today we played on Starfall.com and played with the Amazing Action Alphabet.  The army ants take away the alligators apple, making him very angry!  Learning the letter A is the beginning of reading in preschool.  It's the first time that kids put their reading skills to a real challenge.  Write the word "at" or "am" on a piece of paper or a white board.  Ask your child if they know how to read the word.  Guide them to do the 4 things good readers do: Look, Point, Say, Listen.  Some kids at this stage show that they need more work and play with the letters before they are ready to read and that is perfectly ok!  Other kids are ready to start reading with a bang.  You can quickly identify where your child is at in order to set reasonable goals.  All children should be reading the A book 3x per night, regardless of if they have it memorized or if they are actually reading the text.  Acting like a reader is being a reader!

We continued our theme of opposites with art where we colored with wet and dry chalk.  Our math lesson is continuing on the counting and number sense topic.  Each child came home with a ring of 4 cards and 4 clothes pins.  They are to hold up one card and find the clothes pin with the same number of stickers.  They attach the clothes pin to the card and then move on to the next card.

I encouraged the language, "One is the same as one.  Two is the same as two." and so on.

In our afternoon class we explored the theme of Animal Friends with our new book, "Big Red Barn" (I think that's the title....).  Regardless, it gave us a fantastic opportunity to read through the book looking for adult (capital) A's and princess a's.  We also read about animals in our encyclopedias.  

For math today we made our cards for "Compare" (alternately known as "War", but "Compare" sounds so much more appropriate for preschool....doesn't it?).  Though we made the cards we didn't get past sorting them into sets, so PLEASE make sure the cards in the pocket in the binder come back to school on Wednesday.  For math homework tonight your preschooler can find matching sets.  Spread the cards all out and find both cards that have an equal number of stickers (8 is the same as 8) and stack pairs.  If you're feeling adventurous you could teach how to play Compare.  We will spend plenty of time playing it on Wednesday!

Families - A Preschool Review of MTA

We had oodles of fun in school today.  It's a letter review week and our theme was Families.  Each child started the day with puzzles of their own families that they had to put together.  They loved it and many of them kept hold up puzzles pieces and saying "This is my Mommy."  It was so cute! 

We talked about all the shapes that make up bodies and had a little art lesson about using the shapes to draw something.  We drew ovals for heads, rounded rectangles for bodies and arms/legs.  It was fun to go around the room and write down some details about what they were drawing. 

We worked on sounding out letters in words today since we're reviewing all the letters we've learned.  One strategy is to drive a car under the letters and while the car is under a letter we say the sound of the letter.  The car can drive on the street over and over while the word gets faster and faster. 

 We also had an introduction to numerical order today.  We started talking about first, second and third.  This isn't something that many preschoolers will master, but introducing the vocabulary is great at this stage. 

Animal Friends

We had a fantastic day learning about the letter A and animal friends today.  All of the kids loved coming in this morning to find these mini animals, fishing poles with fish, animal hand puppets and stuffed animals galore!  There was plenty of animal noises around the room as they played with all the items. 

 Art was amazingly engaging today.  We first drew with crayons and then water color painted over the top of our drawings.  Many of the kids were focused on their art for upwards of a half hour!

 We also talked about puppets and made sock puppets today.  Last year when we did sock puppets there was a bit of hesitation about them. This year the kids were ready to dive in and put them on themselves.  They even brought me a second one for their other hand so they could have a puppet on each hand.  The puppets played all around our back yard and some are still drying off from a bath in the tub of sandy water in the sandbox.

 We played with our Animal Friends tot pack today.  I loved playing one-on-one with this little man as we sorted where the animals should live - in the barn or in the house.

Preschool Reading - Opposites Day

This week in preschool we're introducing the letter "a", which gives us the first unique opportunity to teach blending letter sounds to read words.  This is a HUGE concept for any reader and is so important for kids to master with just the 3 letters we've now learned (M, T, A).  I utilize the Amazing Action Alphabet materials, and specifically their Beginning Reader set.  These materials are fantastic in helping kids understand what reading is, a very difficult concept of making the sounds of the letters blend together into words, but very simply developed through these beginning readers.  

 We've already learned letters M and T.  Today we spend some time working on letter A.  It's important for children to be responsible for their own learning and utilize what they've learned.  We spend time being detectives with mini magnifying glasses finding the letter of the week around the room.  We look all around on the walls and the floor for the letter.  Then we mark the letter with highlighter tape.  All of the letter A's that we found are now marked with blue tape throughout the room and will stay that way for the duration of the school year.  At home, encourage your little one to find the letter of the week everywhere you go: on signs, in books, even on cereal boxes!

 I love Starfall.com for all of their variety of activities.  The alphabet activities include fun digital books with interactive pages such as this page where we sorted capital and lowercase letter A apples into their correct basket.

 Here is where we get into the most important concept of the day: blending letters.  This is HUGE and shouldn't be skipped over.  In fact, it should be practiced every day until they understand the concept.  We write the letters "a" and "m" on separate dot stickers.  Then we put the stickers on the left hand.  The "a" goes on the left pointer finger, the "m" goes on the left middle finger.  We call this strategy "tapping".  Tap the left thumb to the left pointer finger (where the letter a is) and make the sound /a/.  Then tap the left thumb to the left middle finger (where the m is) and make the sound /m/.  We are reading the word "am".  We do it slowly at first "/a/ /m/, /a/ /m/" over and over.  Then we speed it up and repeat.  Eventually you make the sounds so quickly together that you blend the sounds into the word.  Your thumb moves from pointer finger to middle finger in more of a slide fashion than a tap.

This is where the "What Good Readers Do" page (in the School Tools preschool pack) comes in.  Good readers do 4 things.  They LOOK at the letters, POINT at the letters, MAKE THE SOUND with their mouths, and LISTEN to the sounds to determine the word.  We're looking, pointing and making the sounds.  Now we have to listen to the word we're saying.  What word are you reading?  What sounds are coming out of your mouth?  When you put those sounds together they make the word "am".  We use the word "am" in sentences like "I am happy."

 Practice tapping the sounds of the word 'am' until your preschooler(s) understands the concept.  Then move onto the word 'at' as the second word to practice tapping.

Today also happens to be themed "Opposites".  We do a number of fun opposites activities such as identifying what opposites are and playing with opposites like wet and dry chalk during art time!