Wind and Insect Release

What a great day to start talking about wind today!  There were gusts of strong wind and some mild wind throughout our class time. We made kites, talked about the letter W and read books about wind.  We learned that wind is made by the hot air going up and the cold are coming underneath it. We played outside flying our kites and running around until the sandbox was just too tempting to stay away from.  We headed inside and learned all about dimes and practiced our songs for our upcoming end of year celebration.

This afternoon we started our day by observing and writing about our now full grown butterflies.  We completed our regular reading lessons and then headed outside to release ladybugs and butterflies.

 We had a great time watching them and holding them, catching the ladybugs again after they flew off our hands and trying to keep them from crawling down shirts, up pants or in hair :).  We spent tons of time with one butterfly who enjoyed a nice long snack of grape juice and everyone that wanted to was able to hold the butterfly on the grape.  It was wonderful!  I'd highly recommend cutting a grape in half and then scoring the inside to see if you can hold the butterfly for a while when releasing.  The other 3 butterflies weren't interested, so it may not work, but we had a good 10 minutes of passing around this one butterfly.

In math today we counted all the way up to 100, but we didn't count normally.  We said each number according to place value.  So we'd say "Six tens, three units. Six tens, four units." and so forth.  I even drew the unit house the tens house on top of the plastic on the hundreds chart occasionally.  I think we had a break through lesson today and I can see the place value number sense kicking in!

Weather

The weather today was perfect!  It started off a little bit chilly with a little wind.  Then the sun came out and warmed us all up!  It was fantastic to experience the change in weather while we were reading books about it.  We continued working on letter W and drew on the chalkboard again, it was still super exciting for them.  We were on Day 5 of a game called "Learning About Spelling".  Up to this point in the year we've been working on making the sounds of the printed letters to figure out what a word is.  Now we're going a bit backwards.  We say a word (today my funny word was 'op') and then stretch it out to determine what letters we should write down that represent the sounds we made.  Then we added different consonants to the beginning of the word to make new words.  So today we figured out that we can make words like 'stop' 'mop' and 'cop'.  We did a lot of wiggling like W the Worm and even painted a worm brown.  Today was the introduction of the quarter.  We sang the Pocket Song to the tune shortening bread and practiced all 4 coins now.  Remember that coins are just an introduction in preschool and there is no need to master them.  Just understand that there are different coins each with its own worth. 

Tot School Weather

Wow!  What a great week to talk about the letter W with nice weather!  We spent tot school outside for the whole day and had so much fun!  The kids were excited to play with everything they hadn't seen for a few months.  The sandbox and the playhouse were quite popular.  We also played in our weather sensory bin (blue rice, cotton balls, silver pipe cleaners bent like lightening, a felt sun).   

 We had snack on a picnic blanket and ate watermelon.  It was so exciting to them that they were having a picnic!  We made windsocks with streamers and had oodles of fun carrying them around the yard.  One art project that we explored was an equal mixture of shaving cream and liquid glue.  We painted "clouds" with them and they turned out really cool!  While we were waiting for moms to come we each got a straw and got to play the part of 'wind' by blowing around all the clouds (cotton balls) on the hard floor.  It was such a blast!

W is for Wind!

We had such a fun time talking about the letter W and wind today in school.  The weather was nice enough for us to go do much of our class outside.  We learned letter W and got to write it with chalk on the big chalkboards.  It was an experience they haven't had for a while and was so exciting we'll most likely do it again on Thursday.  We made kites for art today and had a blast flying them around.  We also learned about the dime and practiced playing "Mary Had A Little Lamb" on the piano.  It was a great fun day!