Preschool Day 1

What a fantastic first day of preschool B 2015!  We hit the ground running talking about who we are from our inquiry block.  We shared our favorite colors and started a list of words to describe ourselves.  So far we have "Learners" and "Readers" on the list.  A great start!  We spent some time talking about expectations after we had our "Who We Are" list started.  We talked about how expectations are rules and we shared ideas about why they are important.  We came up with the following reasons for having expectations: *So we can learn *So we can stay safe *So we can all be happy.  What a great list.  Next came our class expectations or rules.  We decided on the following: *Treat things nicely *Treat people nicely.  Using this language we were able to go throughout our day discussing how to treat things and people nicely within the task we were set out to do.  

The first task at hand was learning about centers.  We've never really done "Centers" before in preschool.  I've always had activities for kids to do as I work with small reading groups.  This year I'm making them into more formal centers where we set a timer and rotate from activity to activity.  They did great at picking up the routine.  We went fishing for letters and sang the song about their name and sound when we caught a letter.  We played puzzles and we worked in small reading groups.

 We jumped right into what good readers do (use their eyes to look at letters, point at letters, say the letter sounds, and listen to letters).  We are working on reading books, blending letters into words, and combining sight words and simple phonics within stories.  After our reading and centers time we did a "Jumping Contest" where I play a song and the kids can jump around the room without touching or talking and get their wiggles out. The sofa turned out to be a great centerpiece for a "jumping race track" around the room and when the song was done they were all lined up!

 Next we moved into writing.  We talked about the way to hold a pencil, that we don't turn pages since we only work on one page per day, we draw pictures on the top empty space and letters/words on the lines below.  We also started talking about the way to form letters.  We talked about what lines are on writing paper (sky line, airplane line, baseline, worm line).  We talked about how letters start at the #2 position on the clock and work their way around (not all of them, but we worked on letter a today).  Then we drew and wrote.  It is always so fun to see from the first day of school to the last week of school how much they grow during this 4 year old year.  I love it!

At the end of the day we learned how to play "Staircases".  It's a number sense game that I love.  We roll the dice and then make a step with that many blocks.  We keep rolling the dice until we have steps 1-6 to make a staircase.  If the roll is a number we already have we simply roll again.

With all these great activities the kids went home already reading and playing math games.  Try to read and play at home so we can keep the momentum going and build upon these concepts on Thursday.  Happy learning!

Circus and Insects

We had a blast learning the letter E with our Elephants and Circus theme this morning.  We started by playing with blow up elephants, a circus tent, and Starfall on the SmartBoard.  Each child got a turn to get their face painted and had the opportunity to pick through different designs to get one that matched what they wanted.  I love how they all turned out.

 We read books about the circus and choral read "Hiccups for Elephant".  There are many words in that book that your little reader should be able to read to you.  We practiced lifting weights like the letter E and saying /e/.  We did a dot-to-dot alphabet page and learned all about the cone shape.

 This afternoon we started our investigations of the insects we're raising in preschool.  We learned what insects are are pretended to use our finger antenna to smell just like insects.  We read a few books, did some observation of the live insects and then drew pictures and wrote words to match.

 We did our baggy book reading and finished our math booklets.  We drew pictures to represent quantities up to 20.  We also practiced sorting out the first two rows of the 100 chart.  Eventually we'll be able to take all the cards out of the chart and put them back in order!

Preschool B - May Math and Reading

Preschool B has been working on developing an understanding of sets greater than 10.  Today we got to explore with a cut and paste base ten printable.  It broke down tens+ones=set.

 After math (which they did excellent at) we moved into reading.  We're now done with our phonics lessons and were able to dive back into interest led reading.  We looked through our encyclopedias for the topic each person was most interested in reading about for the day.

 Lucky for us everyone's first pick had two books on ReadingA-Z.com.  We printed one book that was at/slightly above their independent reading level and printed a second book that was way beyond their reading level but would make a great companion reading text.

 Then they each took a highlighter and marked all the words in the books that they knew.  We discovered that one of the books they knew almost all of the words in and the other book was quite a bit harder.

 We took turns reading our independent reading book.  Then I read the first page or two of the companion reading text with each child.  As we read I would read words that weren't highlighted and the child would read all the words that were highlighted.  I'm hoping that you've been jointly reading the companion reading books all year long.

 If we came to a word that wasn't highlighted but I thought the child would be able to figure it out I would pause and see if they'd jump in.  If they did and figured out the word then they highlighted it.

 I sent home their highlighters in their companion reading book bags so you could continue through the book in the same fashion, adding highlighted marks as needed.

 Then we headed outside for some play time, song practice and snack.

 At the end of the day we drew and wrote in our journals about what we've learned, liked or experienced in preschool throughout the year.

What a great day of learning!

Wednesday Preschool - Zoo Animals

We had so much fun today learning more about the letter Z and zoo animals.  I didn't put the blow up zoo animals out on Monday hoping that they'd be more engaging after they'd played with the other zoo items we had around.  They turned out to be a hit!  

 We also had the little finger puppets out still and due to a dump truck toy being left out by my boys the night before a new game appeared... feeding the blow up animals the finger puppet animals.  The tiger finger puppets were the big blow up tigers food, the elephants were the elephant food, and so on.  The truck became the transport and sorting center.  (and no, I would have never thought to leave out a truck on purpose, what creative kids!)

 We have been working on shared reading throughout the year.  A shared reading is when everyone has a copy of the text and is responsible for following along and I read out loud.  On Monday we paused before reading the text on every page and did a word/letter hunt in the text for words/letters that we know.  I love doing shared readings because there are so many skills that simply need a repetitive practice to master.  Some of these skills we're working on include: holding the book the correct way (upright and forward), turning one page at a time, following directions and staying on the same page as a group.  Today's shared reading was a great success as kids were monitoring themselves and offering to assist their neighbors if they got lost.  It is so heartwarming to watch how they interact at this time of the year.  They've grown together as a school family.

 VB decided to put a stool right next to my rocking chair and wanted to be my helper all day.  It was so cute.

 During our music time all of the blow up animals were invited to sing along with us.  I can't believe how great our class is at our program songs already.  They picked them up so quickly.  Be sure that you've marked your calendar for our end of year BUG celebration to watch their cute performance.

 Drawing our favorite zoo animals.

 We've been working on recognizing the numerals 0-10 and got to play on Starfall.com today on the SMARTBoard.  Every child got to take a turn picking a number and completing the activities that went along with it.

 Working on our puzzles.

 These two boys were so creative.  One was a tiger (ZR) and one was a bear (CJ).  They were piling up the blow up animals on this bench and then they "Needed to eat meat!" so they'd rambunctiously pretend to eat all the animals.  Okay, now that I type it it sounds gruesome  but when they were playing it I thought it was quite ingenious.

 Afternoon preschool moved on to reading a level C book called "Sherman Sure Is Shy" from ReadingA-Z.com after playing outside for the first 15 minutes of the day (it was so warm and we couldn't resist!).

 We talked about the definition of a character and described Sherman's thoughts, feelings, and actions.

 I thought today's math activity was going to be incredibly awesome and engaging.  I was wrong. :( They weren't very interested in matching the numerals to the images of the numbers and the puzzles (being only 6 pieces) weren't difficult to put together without paying attention to the numbers.  It also turned out to be not such a great printable due to the images of the numerals.  I didn't notice before we started playing with it that the base ten blocks weren't separated in the ones category, they were rods just like the tens.  I think it ended up more confusing than anything.  Oh well.  We'll try a different activity next week.

 We did more studying about worms, their body parts and habitats since we'll be doing our mud and worms day on Monday.  Be sure to watch your email for details about that, it's sure to be a messy 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.