Digging for Dinosaurs

Wow!  What a great day of school!  The kids loved playing in the indoor sandbox and digging for dinosaurs.  We read the "Magic Tree House" dinosaurs book while they dug away the sand and "found" dinosaur bones.  There was quite a bit of digging and building and dinosauring happening this morning.

 We used the hole punches to decorate our dancing letter D and cut out sandpaper to make dinosaur bodies in our journals. It was a great day of learning!

 This afternoon we worked diligently in our guided reading groups and on our Ready2Read work.  The kids are doing fantastic with their reading.  I'm very impressed with their skills.

 We read "The Kiss that Missed" and drew our favorite parts in our journals.  We included words to describe our pictures and every one of them did a great job at sounding out the word(s) they wanted to write and wrote the letters.  Great work!

We finished our unit about coins today.  Now they know the 4 main coins, a little about them and what they're worth.  It's more of an introductory lesson that will be reintroduced in Kindergarten math. We ended the day with some fun in the sandbox.  What a great day!

Dancing and Amazing Peaceful Learning

This morning our preschool A spent their time here talking about letter D and dancing.  We danced for 2 hours of our 2.5 hours together.  My pedometer read that I had taken 3000 steps in those 2.5 hours.  I generally manages around 1k each class.  We were moving!  And there were so many cute pictures I could hardly pick and choose.  So, here's the breakdown.  We danced.  We ate snack. We read our D book.  We danced some more. We made patterns.  Check out the cute pics!

This afternoon was amazing!  Perhaps it was because the tables were put in the other room still and we did our reading lessons on the floor.  Everyone got their lessons done quickly, I read with each child and we were through our work in record time!  Remember to read with your child tonight and tomorrow (practice the W Amazing Action Alphabet mini book and/or review the Ready2Read pages).

 After we finished our reading lessons I read "How I Became a Pirate" to the class.  We orally did a 5 finger retell of the book and then wrote our own book reports about our favorite part.  Then we got to share our reports with everyone.

 We had snack, got to play outside, learned about dimes and then played music and had free time to play with blocks and dolls.  It was a fantastic day!

Snowy Dinosaurs

This morning we had a great time talking about snow.  We played with shaving cream and glue "snow" as well as powdered "snow".  We learned the letter F and never before has the letter F been so easy to teach (Thank You, Frozen!).  We're working diligently to sound out the letters and blend them into words. 

 One of the reading groups had a really fun time teaching their sock monkey all the things that good readers do.  It was so fun to watch them do this.  We also practiced tracing our names on snowflakes.  In math we continued working on graphing.  We did just a couple pages of practice on the SmartBoard before our time was up for the day.

This afternoon we were talking about the letter D and dinosaurs.  We started the day being paleontologists digging for dinosaurs in our mini sand boxes.  The kids really loved this activity. 

 We read a book about dinosaurs and used yellow markers to mark the words that we could read.  Then one group continued that strategy by marking the words in their mini readers.  We also read the page in our encyclopedia about dinosaurs.  In their encyclopedia you'll find a small paper glued into the dinosaur page.  It's a b and d reminder picture to help kids remember which is which.

We had a ton of fun with math today.  We're talking about 2d shapes and their characteristics.  Today we utilized a shape building toy I have to work on it.  I first pulled out the pieces to make a shape and asked them what shape I could make.  We talked about how we could know for sure what I was going to make (shape of the sides "curved or straight", how many sides, how many corners) and then I built it.  After the lesson I set them loose to make any of the 4 basic shapes on their own.  It was quite interesting to watch them figure out what pieces they need in order to complete the task.

We did a lot of great learning today. Don't forget that Wednesday is Polar Express day and kids are welcome to wear their pajamas and bring a teddy bear!

D is for Dancing

Dancing is such a fun day in preschool.  We turn on music and dance the day away!  We danced like robots, did yoga, the chicken dance, and dressed up in costumes.  We played the piano and enjoyed a variety of different types of music to dance to. 

 Our dancing art was such a hit!  I laid out 3 long strips of paper side by side and dropped splats of paint all over it.  With rolled up pants we danced all over the paper and made such a wonderful group picture!

Dancing Dinosaurs in Tot School

Talk about oodles of fun!  We learned about the letter D by playing with dinosaurs in our indoor sandbox and dancing the day away!  Everyone loved digging and playing with the tot packs and puzzles. 

 We did a fun stamping activity with dinosaur outlines, made dinosaur sock puppets and even did an amount of yoga (that's dancing, right?).  We had so much fun!

Dinosaurs in Preschool!

We had so much fun learning all about dinosaurs!  To beat the winter cold we decided to purchase the sand for our sandbox in January and fill up a swimming pool with it in the living room.  It made for a whole lot of fun for about a week!  The sandbox was filled with dinosaur toys of all sorts as well as paintbrushes for digging.  We read "Dinosaurs Before Dark" and practiced making dinosaur noises all day. 

 We wrote/drew book reports about the story we read before moving on to talk about patterns, practicing the piano, working with puzzles and reading more books.  It was a great day!