Gardens and Plants

What a lovely tot school we had this morning.  We talked all about gardens and plants, which is a wonderful topic at this time of year when our backyard garden is exploding with growth.  We "planted" flowers in play dough and took a tour of all the plants in the garden.

 We found tickly weeds and everyone got to have their very own - until they all fed them to the chickens :). There was a lot of bike riding, shopping cart pushing, watering can filling (though not watering, oddly enough), and plenty of play in the playhouse with the play kitchen.

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.

Plants for Preschoolers

What a delightful day of learning!  We learned all about plants, plant parts and how they grow.  We spent lots of time reading books and labeling different parts of plants.  We're continuing to work on our pre-reading books and the kids are really getting the hang of the repetitive text, a great first step to reading!  Find a bit more information about pre-reading texts here. 

We also enjoyed learning about numeral 6 with our TouchMath TouchNumerals and the iPad counting app from TouchMath.  We had a great day of learning!

Plants - A Tot School Experience

We love spring time at Little Adventures Preschool.  It means planting, and new life, and warm days!  Today our theme was all about plants.  It's such a fun theme to learn all about the parts of a plant and the life cycle of a plant.  Find our Plants Tot Pack Here!  We had a great amount of fun today playing with puzzles.  Through the year we've mostly pulled out the single piece chunky puzzles in tot school and it was fun to see which kids were ready for 12 piece puzzles.  We'll pull out the larger puzzles more often now!

 The kids LOVED the art project we did to show all the parts of the plant.  We started with our white sheet of paper and talked about where the dirt should go.  Then we went through the growth of a plant sequentially.  First we put a seed in the dirt (hot glue works well).  Next, the seed grows roots (string tied in a knot and separated, also hot glued on).  Then it grows a stem, followed by leaves and a flower.  There are also labels in the printable pack but we didn't get to that point yet.  We'll repeat the same activity tomorrow in preschool - look for an image with the labels then.

As the kids that come over are getting older we're prepping them for access to the whole garden.  In a few weeks the fence that has been keeping everyone out will be taken down.  We're utilizing all our springtime themes to take tours of the garden and talk about the plants and how to help the plants to grow (no touching or picking flowers).  We've also been talking a lot about garden beds and how our feet stay in the walkways.  It's working so far.  For the most part when they're turned free to play they all just end up in the sandbox anyway :).  What a lovely day to get out and play with plants!

Preschool Fruit Theme

What a fantastic day of school!  We've been learning so much lately in school.  Our theme today was "Fruit" (makes sense with the theme "Vegetables" on Tuesday).  We started with puzzles, a repeated activity we'll do for the rest of the year.  We read a few books about fruit including "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad" a fantastic book that you'll find a post about (and a giveaway!) later today. We continued with our guided reading lesson working on level A pre-reader texts.  Wonder why we're working on these texts since we've been using decodable texts all year?  Check out V is for Vegetable for more clarity. 

Another super fun aspect of our day today was that on our property we have about 10 different fruit trees and plants.  We were able to go on a nature walk just in our little area and talk about each of the different plants.  We searched for flowers that were starting to pop out and talked about if we don't bother them the bees will pollinate the flowers and fruits will grow.  We talked about the different shapes and colors of the different leaves and flowers. 

After returning inside we talked about numeral 4.  There is a great little series of books I read from Scholastic called "Number Stories".  There is a number chant at the end of each book and the kids love it!  They get to clap and stomp and jump and turn all for the number of the day.  It's so much fun.  Check out our full lesson plans for the Preschool Fruit Theme here. 

Thursday Tot School - Plants

We had so much fun learning about plants today.  We started with play-dough, some flowers on craft sticks (to be planted in the play-dough of course) and some scissors for trimming the play-dough "grass". 

 We spent some time talking about the different parts of plants that we eat.  We get to eat the roots, stems. leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds of different plants.

 We also sorted animals and plants.

 We've been playing with clothes pins, trying to pin them on pieces of paper, to help develop motor skills in our hands.

 Playing with the plants bulletin board.

 The girls were so proud of themselves when they pulled the cushion off the bench and climbed on top.  They were so cute!

 BK was SO excited about the horse in an "Amelia Bedelia" book that was sitting out from afternoon preschool on Wednesday. She flipped through the whole book looking for more horses.

 We learned all about X today. The sound for X is very tricky.  It starts with a /k/ sound and then has the /s/ sound, so X says /ks/.

 We talked about the different parts of a plant and then got to dissect some seeds.

 It seems that magnifying glasses make great goggles :)

 We made our flower pictures from pre-cut paper shapes.  Each child had their own glue stick and I went around helping them to glue the different pieces of the flower onto their paper.  They got to explore with putting the glue on the paper themselves and started understanding that the glue goes on one paper with the intent to stick another paper on top of it.

 What a fun day!

Wednesday Preschool - Plants

If you haven't noticed yet, I love plants and gardening.  I'm always really excited to teach the kids little snippets of things I'm passionate about, and teaching about plants was one of those really fun days. 

 We started the day with puzzles again.  We're going to continue working on them every day for our starter activity for the rest of the year.  We have some kids who are working on 12 piece puzzles and others that work in teams on 48 piece puzzles and everything in between.  Keep working on them at home if they are challenging for your little one.

 We went upstairs to draw in our journals.  We got to draw a plant and then we talked about all the parts of a real plant and if we forgot to draw a part of it we added it to our drawing.

 We also talked about the needs of a plant and how plants need air, sun and water.  We cut open a piece of celery and talked about the small tubes inside of it that act as straws to suck the water up into the plant.  Then I put a piece of celery in red water so we could investigate it later.  (and that later never arrived... everyone was out the door before I remembered it again... oops.)

 Then we dissected seeds to see what the parts of a seed were.

 If you've never looked before, this is the best shot of the baby plant inside a seed that I could get.  The long part will become the stem and the "fish tail" at the end is actually 2 really small leaves that will become the first leaves of the plant.

 Our numbers and counting activity was to glue the correct number of seeds (split peas) onto a numbered stick.  So if the stick was labeled "5" we glued 5 seeds onto it.  This was completely independent (other than me occasionally identifying a numeral for a child), so if there are correct or incorrect numbers on your child's project it's a great assessment of what they know.

 To get some movement into our day we got to walk/run/skate/tip-toe around the house to a song called "Listen and Move".  It's a great movement activity song.

 We also practiced number sense with numerals by putting the correct number of dots on large foam numbers from TouchMath.

 In afternoon preschool we got to read an "easy" book today.  It's more about the fluency and building confidence as readers since the next few books we'll be doing will take quite a bit more patience.  They won't be any harder to decode, but the text is longer (multiple sentences per page).

 When your kids are reading their books to you please listen for fluency.  They shouldn't be pausing between each word.  If the sentence ends with a question mark their intonation should represent that.

 We played a fun matching game with some sight words that we've known for many months and are "so easy".  (Is this a theme?  It seems that all day they kept telling me how easy things were.  I guess I'll be bringing on the challenges on Monday :)

 We're continuing to work on representing quantities with base ten blocks.  They each advanced to slightly higher numbers and will continue to get higher number cards (up to making 99 with this game, and possibly making numbers up to 999 with another).  Keep playing this at home.  The more they understand what each number in a numeral represents and how to show it the more they'll understand the manipulation of numerals (addition, subtraction, etc).

 We decided at the end of the day that we'd explore the play-dough.  The game apparently turned into some form of "making cookies for Santa".  It was fun to listen to their conversations about it.

Tuesday Tot School - Plants

Tuesday Tot School was a very fun mish-mash this week.  We have a couple of kids on vacation and are doing a few make up days, so we have about 2 regular Tuesday kids and 2 Thursday kids in one class.  It confused me more than I thought it would :)

 We started off the day playing with play-dough and "planting" flowers from the tot pack into the play-dough.

 We are also focusing a lot on scissor usage and played with the play-dough scissors as well.

 Next we started learning all about the parts of a plant.  We started with a seed.  We learned that seeds have 3 parts: a seed coat, a baby plant, and stored food for the plant to grow.

 I had soaked some large beans overnight and we got to dissect them.

 Then we made a picture of a flower.  I had all the pieces pre-cut and each child got their own glue stick.  I went from kid to kid having each child help me put glue on a certain spot for the flower.  In between turns they got to glue all over. The most important thing they learned is that glue is sticky :)

 I showed them how to tuck the petals under the circle and they got to do that part on their own.

 We also glued on a piece of yarn as the roots.

 We did some one-on-one labeling of the parts of the flower.  For the most part they were able to point out the different parts.

 Playing with the magnetic bulletin board about plants.

 We also had a few puzzles around for exploration.

 Reading a magazine about plants.