Number Gators, a Preschool Introduction to Greater Than and Less Than

We had a wonderful extra day of preschool today (still making up for so many snow days).  One of the things I love to do when teaching reading is to utilize highlighter tape.  Right now we are using it heavily to point out where long vowels are in words and where we need to use our strategy called "puzzle" to find parts of words we know or can already sound out (including digraphs like 'th' and word families like 'ing'). (See pg 25 of this free download for the reading strategies we use after we learn all the letter sounds.)

 Today was the introduction of our new math unit: Writing and Comparing Numbers.  We didn't do any writing of numbers today but had our fun preschool introduction to greater than and less than.  We learned the end of this Number Gators song and played with these free printables and our kitchen items to determine which alligator would eat which pile of food.  It was a great way to introduce greater than, less than, and equal to.  I also switch the words back and forth also using "bigger than", "smaller than" and "the same as" to scaffold the vocabulary learning.

Vowels are Super Heroes

I love my job.  Today in preschool we continued working on our reading lessons for each group.  It was appropriate for all kids to participate in a fun extension lesson about vowels.  Some kids have already learned them, some have had it introduced, and some hadn't heard the word vowels before.  We all did the same lesson together.  I talked about how there are 26 letters in the alphabet.  We sang the alphabet together.  Then I asked kids to hold up one hand.  Those 5 fingers represent 5 super hero letters called vowels.  They are super special letters.  In order to learn how to use them in words we have to remember which ones they are.  The vowels are A E I O U.  I wrote one letter on each of my finger nails.  Then, as I pointed to each finger, I sang the song: "A E I O U, I can learn my vowels too. A E I O U, it is fun for me and you!"  I let kids pick if they would like the vowels written on their fingernails as well or not.  Many chose to have them written on, then we sang the song over and over together.  Remembering that there are 5 super letters called vowels and what letters they are is the first step in mastering their unique uses in our reading. 

I love that after our reading so many of the kids decided to spend their writing time drawing their hand, the vowels and writing about learning the vowels today.  It was a great reinforcement lesson to hear them share their writing with the whole group!

Karate, Quilts and Dr. Seuss

This morning in preschool we learned about the letter K.  We talked all about karate and keeping our bodies healthy.  We read a book called "The Great Race" about some barnyard animals that race each other.  It's super cute!  We also worked on blending our letter sounds to make words.

 We're still working on our b's and d's and had a fun time cutting out our K the Kangaroos.  We played with balls for math today as we talked about circles being flat and spheres being round like a ball.

 This afternoon we continued the Dr. Seuss celebration with today being his actual 111th birthday.  We read The Cat in the Hat and drew and wrote about our favorite parts.  We worked on our math matching game and in our Ready2Read units.

 We also talked about quilts and made a class quilt that is now hanging on the wall.  Just like the morning class we read "The Great Race" and there are TONS of words that your 4 year old should be able to read by themselves in this book.  It's a great companion reading book, so pull it out of their binder and practice reading together!

Race Cars and the Zoo

What a great time in school this morning.  Even with all the snow everyone was able to make it safely and we learned a ton!  I'm so glad we didn't have to cancel school but I was nervous for those of you on the roads.  This morning we were talking about letter R and race cars all day. Everyone LOVED the Usborne Race Cars book.  It has tracks for wind up race cars to go on.  It was a hit!  We also made a couple of cardboard cars and ran around saying /r/!  Each child got an eraser (cars, airplanes, boats or trains) and we raced them them in the air saying /r/!

 We had great reading lessons today.  I'm so proud of this class!  They are doing fantastic!  The letter R book introduced the sight word "to".  We practiced reading "to" with the sight word watch from the Moffatt Girls.  I was super proud of my second reading group who made great leaps in blending sounds together, they're getting it!

 For art today we played with a sensory bin of water beads.  It was used last week for our homeschool Bloodmobile lesson and since water beads tend to hang around forever we decided to play with them in preschool as well. After the sensory bin we had a fun math lesson about shapes.  We talked about all the shapes around us: the white board is a rectangle, the clock is an oval, there are triangles on the borders, etc.  Then each child got their writing notebook and went on a treasure shape hunt throughout the room.  They found lots of different shapes and drew what they found.  It was the cutest thing ever!  They were so busy with their "work".  Walking around and finding comfortable places like the stairs to sit and draw.  It was so cute and so fun!

 This afternoon we continued our Ready2Read lessons.  We started the Level 2 word wall with a few of the kids and began introducing consonant blends and digraphs.  We also got to read a new book "I Love You, Zooborns!"

 We also got to play with the water bead sensory bin after snack and I was quite impressed with the kids that were a part of the homeschool blood lesson.  They were telling everyone else about what the parts of the sensory bin represented.  I was happy to see that lesson stuck!

 After art we headed downstairs for math.  We're making our own books for math right now.  Each page has a number and a decimal street drawing to match.  We're working on labeling the houses ("tens" and "units") and drawing them appropriately.  We're working on making sure that 6 is represented with 6 units instead of 6 sticks of ten.  We'll work more on this the next couple of days before moving on to counting to 100.  Please continue to play the matching card game at home!

Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!  A few kids pointed out that today was in fact not Valentine's day.  However, since we don't have school on Saturday we celebrated it today!  This morning was a blast learning about the letter U.  We used a big balloon with a capital U and a small balloon with a lower case u to practice the /u/ sound.  We made the balloon go /u/ /u/ /u/ - UP! and then tossed it to another student to repeat the action.  We also talked about all the words in the mini U book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We talked about the family of frogs in the book and acted out all the actions that they do throughout the book.  After snack time each child got a box of heart candies to sort and graph.  We practiced one-to-one counting and determining which color and the most and the least. 

 After math we handed out Valentines to our friends with our decorated Valentine bags and then did a letter review game with balloons.  Each balloon had a letter on it.  The idea of the game was to look at the letter on the balloon and then sing the song about the letter name and sound ("N says /n/, N says /n/, every letter makes a sound, N says /n/").

 This afternoon we read a fun story called "The Day it Rained Hearts".  It's a simple and sweet story about a little girl making Valentine cards out of hearts that rained from the sky. Each child then drew their favorite part and added words to their drawing.  We then took turns sharing our work with the whole class.

 We did our regular guided reading groups today so everyone has 2 new baggy books to be reading.   For math we repeated our lesson from last Wednesday about units and sticks of 10.  Then we got out our math cards and paired up to play the matching game.  PLEASE play this game LOTS at home!

We had a great time playing outside for a bit.  Cheering for kids who completed Ready2Read units, coloring Valentine bags and handing out our Valentines.  It was a great day!

Indians and Pilgrims

NOTE: This theme is meant as an introduction to Native Americans and Pilgrims. I have intentionally used the word Indian to introduce the letter I. Indian, however, is not an accurate description of Native Americans. For more information please see this link. There are also many different tribes of Native Americans that have very different traditions. Though the Pilgrims were in contact with the Wampanoag, this theme introduces ideas from many different tribes.

We had great fun this morning as everyone came in they colored their I headband from the Moffatt Girls.  We added feathers behind the I for a headdress and a Pilgrim style hat on the back side so they could decide what side to have in front.  We listened to Native American Round Dance music while we made our headbands and while we read stories about the Pilgrims and Indians.  Next we moved into reading.  We practiced the letter Ii on the SMARTboard and each child took a turn tracing the letters while we all said, "/i/"!

 We had a blast in art today painting with feathers.  We used rather small craft feathers and the creative artwork that came out of it was quite fun and interesting. Most pictures included small strokes of paint rather than a big mess of paint that usually happens with preschoolers.  We had a fun time exploring big/little and quantities with the dry corn and oodles of buckets, scoops and containers!

 I took a video of our reading lesson this morning.  Because of the blog restrictions I had to split it into 3 videos (a total of 15 minutes in length).  It may be helpful to watch through them to see how we do our shared reading lesson together.  The way I read through books (even one-on-one with beginning readers) is to sound out each word and then go back and fluently reread the sentence.  I'd highly encourage you to do this at home.  The beginning reader books that we use throughout the whole year come from The Amazing Action Alphabet. 

In the afternoon we started our day out with the corn (it was out already and cleaning it up after didn't seem so daunting to me with such great helpers). They LOVED playing with the corn.  It was "popcorn" and "ice cream" and "for sale".  The creativity was awesome!  We had our regular reading lessons working within our small reading groups to master the skills appropriate.

 During math today we talked about AB patterns and how to "read" a pattern.  We took turns sharing our unifix cube patterns with the whole class "reading" the colors (red, orange, red, orange) and the letter names (a, b, a, b).  They picked it up quickly and were able to identify areas of their pattern that didn't work correctly and fix the problem.  We also painted with feathers this afternoon after a conversation about it now being November and the month of Thanksgiving.

Beginning Reader Mini Books Giveaway!

We've been working the past few weeks on our pre-reading books.  It's an important stage of reading development to be able to memorize text patterns and learn the skills that pre-reading texts provide practice in.  Be sure to check out my post about pre-reading books to familiarize yourself with the concept and skills we can be working on. 

Throughout the year we've been working on our repertoire of decodable texts.  I strongly believe that we can teach young children the alphabet in a manner where it is usable to them immediately, rather than just learning the names and sounds of symbols that don't have a purpose.  Each week as we focus on a new letter we add it to the letters we already know and work on sounding-out or decoding words with those letters.    

A decodable text in preschool is a text that utilizes only short vowels and single consonant sounds (think of CVC or consonant-vowel-consonant words like "cat").  We don't try to tackle tough phonics like digraphs (think of "th" or "sh") or soft sounds (think of "g" in giraffe).  Reading is a skill that requires a lot of practice and it's easier to practice something you are being successful at.  By the 3rd week of preschool we know the letters M, T and A and can decode or sound-out the words "at" and "am" and "mat".  That is literally success right out the gate!

I have been partnering with Esther from The Amazing Action Alphabet since I started teaching preschool.  The products she provides are excellent and follow this same philosophy that we can teach our young learners with great success.  She has a set of Beginning Reader Mini Books that are just perfect for our young readers.  The first page covers some of the basics of reading which helps every teacher or mom that has never taught reading before be successful. Then each 8.5 x 11 page has a book, intended to be copied, cut and stapled together.  Each book builds upon the previous ones as we learn to blend sounds together to read words.  The pictures are black and white and perfect for coloring.  Since they are paper books I LOVE having the kids circle any sight words they come across (I think there are a total of 6 sight words they learn to memorize).

Even if you don't win the books you can still get a great deal! I just heard back from Esther at Amazing Action Alphabet and she wants to offer a 20% discount code to readers of Little Adventures Preschool.  Just enter 11131971 at checkout! 

I  love how the second page of each book has a word list.  In the beginning of our reading lesson we write the words from the word list one at a time on the white board and practice sounding them out.  We draw pictures where it's helpful and we act things out (like "zip") to practice the words.  Then we head to the reading table where I have a big copy of the book.  I simply copied each little page to fit on a 8.5x11 by itself and put it in sheet protectors.  That way we have a giant shared reading version of the book to reference while each child has their own child size version in front of them.  We do a picture walk through the book and talk about what the pictures are showing us about the story.  Then we take turns reading pages through the story.  It works great and the kids are being successful!

I know that each of you would love to be successful in teaching reading in your home or school, right? Well, now is your chance!  Check out the Rafflecopter below and enter to win one of two copies of the Beginning Reader Mini Books from the Amazing Action Alphabet!  And don't forget to grab your discounted materials with coupon code 11131971 at checkout!  All of her products are simply amazing!

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Zoo Animals - Day 2

On our second day of learning the letter Z and all about Zoo animals we had another fantastic reading lesson.  This time everyone got a copy of a zoo book called I Love You, Zoo Borns.  This is a fantastic reader for this group because it contains many of the sight words (the, to) and simple words (is, in) that we already know how to read.  We used highlighter tape to mark all the words that we could read on our own on each page.  This is a FANTASTIC activity to do at home with your young reader.  Give them the opportunity to search young reader books for words they know.  It will help them to identify sight words and take charge of their reading.  Plus, they have so much fun with it!

We also did handprint animals to celebrate zoo animals today.  We painted our hands to represent lions, monkeys, zebras and peacocks.  The kids got to pick which animals they wanted to do and then I supplied the appropriate colors of paint and paint brushes.  It was so much fun!

Spring Book Giveaways!

Isn't it lovely that spring is in the air?  What a wonderful time of year.  We turn much of our attention to nature based themes this time of year in preschool. This past week we had so much fun learning all about fruits and vegetables.  It was so much fun to talk about the parts of plants that we commonly eat.  This book, "Tops and Bottoms" is a great story about a Hare who demonstrates that hard work pays off.  He tricks the lazy bear into letting him have certain parts of the crops and after doing all the work he gains the reward - food for his family.  Our preschoolers love this book every year.  It makes them giggle as we talk about the parts of the crops that each animal gets to keep.  As my springtime gift you I'm picking one lucky winner to have this book (or End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad, posted below) for your very own collection!  Keep reading for details.

"As usual, Stevens' animal characters, bold and colorful, are delightful. . . . It's all wonderful fun, and the book opens, fittingly, from top to bottom instead of from side to side, making it perfect for story-time sharing."-- Booklist

It is my absolute pleasure to introduce to you a new kind of book.  It's the first in a series of recipe-adventure stories created to teach and entertain young children. "Ideal for early child development, End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad uses the art of cooking, colorful illustrations and critical thinking lessons to make learning both educational and fun for kids. From counting and colors to food exploration and fun problem solving, this Kitchen Club Kids’ book gives parents a reason to start cooking and helping to establish healthy eating habits. As an added bonus, each story features a rhymey-good-timey recipe that can be prepared in the kitchen by cooks of any caliber."

We had so much fun with this book in our preschool class. It paired perfectly with our conversation about fruit and our math theme of representing quantities and numbers with numerals.  We were able to talk about our favorite fruits, name the colors of the fruits and practice naming numerals and counting to ten.

After we read the book we continued our fruit conversation to the snack table where we prepared a fruit salad.  We didn't have the exact ingredients (and we forgot the kiwis) but the kids had a blast pouring all the fruits into the bowl, mixing them up and enjoying their snack. I am very pleased with the resulting positive conversations about certain fruits that were previously not appealing.  I'm so glad that the authors created a book to encourage healthy eating in this day and age of processed food.  Fine work Bread+Butter Publishing!  In addition to the previous book, I also have an "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad book to give away to one lucky winner.  Check out the details below and enter to win it for your own library!

Follow the Rafflecopter instructions below for your chance to win one of these fantastic books.  There will be two winners.  The first will get their book pick and the second will get the one left over (hopefully their book pick too!).  Books will be mailed out on Monday April 21st (upon receipt via email of the winner's mailing address).  Join us for the fun and complete your entries between now and the 21st!  Good Luck!

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V is for Vegetables

Learning about letter V is so much fun!  It makes our lips tickle to make the sound!  We started off our day working on puzzles, a fantastic tool to work on visual perception, fine-motor skills, thinking, reasoning and logic.  We're attempting to make the jump from 12 piece puzzles to 24 piece puzzles.  The 12 piece ones are still a challenge to a few of us so we'll keep working on those.  We also took the time today to let the preschoolers update the calendar to represent April (a little late I know).  It was a great counting and number placement activity for us.

Today we also started work on pre-reading books.  Pre-Reading skills are the skills that a person needs before they can become a reader.  Many of these skills are learned through natural introduction from the adults and “big kids” in a child’s life.  We have started more formal guided reading lessons using the Scholastic GRL A book set.  This set is helpful because there are multiple copies of each book so everyone can have their own to read.   There are a few goals I have in mind with these books:

·        Direction: Text goes from left to right.  We read books from left to right.
·        Concepts of print: How we handle books is a skill.  Can you hold it right side up?  Can you turn the pages the correct direction and only one page at a time?  Can you find the text on the page?  Do you know that the words tell the story?
·        Patterns: Literature often has rhythm and patterns in it.  These pre-readers are set up with repetitive text and a predictable picture-clue to the new vocabulary on each page.
·        Memorization: In order to be successful readers we have to memorize certain things like letter names and sounds.  The first step to this is memorizing the repetitive text.
·        Acting like a Reader: Reading is fun when we are successful.  It can also be really frustrating if we aren't being successful.  By memorizing the text and acting like a reader before being able to actually read the words we can be successful with just the basic skills.  Please don’t correct a child if they say the words differently than the text; praise them for their story telling and read the book again and again to them and they’ll pick up the memorization on their own.
·       Utilize our reading strategy known as "Get Your Mouth Ready".  While pointing at the words we get our mouth ready to say the beginning sound of the word.  Even if we can't yet successfully decode the word we can remember the rhythm and rhyme and be prompted by the beginning sound.

Find a set of free printable pre-reading books here.
Based on our theme we also read tons of books about vegetables, including our favorite "Tops and Bottoms".  It's a fantastic book about the parts of each plant that are considered food.  Be sure to check out the blog for upcoming posts for a book giveaway of this book and one other!

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. 

Animals in Spring - A Preschool Chick Experience

Wow! Talk about a great day in school!  How fun is playing with baby chicks for the "Animals in Spring" theme?  With the bigger preschoolers we were able to sit in the kiddy pool and let the baby chicks explore.  

 This is a great photo grouping of how nearly everyone reacted.  1. "I'm not certain about this..." 2. "They're climbing on me!" 3. "This is so exciting!" 4. "I love chicks!"  It took a little bit to get accustomed to each other but in the end everyone was happy to have one climb on their lap and be able to pet it.  We even held out little grains of their food for them and loved watching them jump from one person's lap to the next.

 The rest of our day included our lesson in spelling, which is a great activity if you haven't looked into it yet.  Up to this point in the year we've been working on reading words written down.  Now we're talking about how the words that come out of our mouths are just combinations of letters that we can then write down.  Check out the "Animals in Spring" pack for more information. We also did a group reading of "Mouse's First Spring" a book with many little words that the preschoolers can already read.  The bonus is that they each got to keep a copy of the book.  In math we learned about the nickel.  In preschool it's purely introduction and they love it.  We sang our pocket song to "Shortning Bread".  It goes like this: "Which coin is in my pocket, pocket? What's in my pocket worth __ cents? (then they guess what it is and we continue) It's a shiny ____, _____.  It's a ____ worth ___ cent."  The kids love it!

Gingerbread Friends

I love gingerbread day!  For us it's like gingerbread week.  We started off preschool with some gingerbread coloring, button sorting and playing the Starfall.com gingerbread game on the SmartBoard and on the iPad.

 Our reading lesson today was a whole group lesson.  Everyone received their own copy of "The Gingerbread Man" and we read through it page by page marking the words we knew how to read with highlighter tape.  I love it when kids become engaged in a task like this.  Each one was looking through their copy of the book to find the word "the", "I", or "a".  I think we also found the word "sat" along with a few others.  It's the first step to really knowing that reading happens in the real world and that they're learning to do what the adults are doing.  It's such a fun activity! Even if you're only homeschooling one child I'd recommend that you get them some highlighter tape and let them go to town marking all the words they can read in a book.  Then when you read the book together to adult reads all the big words and the child reads all the highlighted words.

 What's a gingerbread day without decorating and eating some gingerbread cookies?

 We also enjoyed art time with paint and play dough.  It was a fantastic fun filled day!

Caterpillars and a Preschool Reading Lesson

We had a great day learning all about caterpillars and butterflies.  We talked about the life cycle and some of the key words (like cocoon) that they'd encounter in their reading.  Everyone got 5 'C' stickers and got to look through all the reading books that we had about caterpillars.  They were so engaged in looking at the pictures and finding the letter C within the text. 

 We continued our reading lessons following the Amazing Action Alphabet.  Grab our caterpillar preschool lesson plans here!

 We had oodles of fun doing leaf rubbings, cutting leaves like crazy, and practicing the vocabulary "near" and "far".

Sometimes when we're working with preschoolers it's good to see how a lesson might actually happen.  Today I spent about 5 minutes per kid in some one-on-one reading lesson time.  I took video of a few of the kids, but due to the nature of the beast there are names used etc so I can't post them all.  Here is my reading lesson with EMan (now 3yrs 2months).  I haven't edited it so it's very realistic to what really happens in our little classroom.  

Helpful Kids

I love the theme "Helpful Kids".  We learn about the letter H and we talk about how kids have an important roll to play in the world.  We read few of the "Bucket Fillers" books and talk about how our actions affect not only ourselves, but the people around us.  All day long we get to put pompoms into our class bucket as we're doing things that really help out.

We spend the majority of the day working on our reading skills.  Now that we've introduced the letter H we can work on so many new words (ham, hat).  We love using whiteboards in our reading groups.  I utilize the Amazing Action Alphabet mini readers and write one word per board for each of the kids so they are each presented with a different word they need to read.  We go around the circle many times so that in the end they practice every word, but never right after the person before them. 

 Some of our preschoolers are still working on remembering our letter names and sounds, and that's a perfect place to be!  We practice with our letter cards from Amazing Action Alphabet because the picture of the animal always helps us remember the story about them and the sound they make. We also play funny word games with the white board.  I put a word on like "hat" and together we sound it our really slow, then a bit faster.  Then I'd say something like "I know, it says socks!" and they'd all giggle and we'd talk about how it can't say socks because socks starts with the letter s.  The concept of the letters matching the sounds coming out of your mouth in speech can be a really tricky one to master.  The more you play with the letters and letter games in words the better at this age.  We're having a fantastic time in preschool and I hope you are too!  Check out our Helpful Kids Preschool Lesson Plans Here!

Preschool Bubbles

We loved continuing to learn about letter B on Thursday in preschool.  It was very exciting to explore bubbles of all sorts as well.  We played the letter B Starfall.com game and with the Bubbles App when the kids first came in. 

Everyone got their own letter B stickers to put on their shirt as we sat at circle time reading stories about bubbles.  We've also started working in reading groups.  We have half of the kids work on a project on their own (reading from available books, playing making words, etc.) and the other half of the kids work with me at the reading table.  This helps me do more one-on-one with each child.  We play different games at the reading table that target the specific needs of the kids that are playing.  One of my groups is working on the letter names/sounds and quickly recalling them for reading.  We're playing matching games with mini Amazing Action Alphabet cards and tracing sandpaper letters as we say the sounds.  The other group is working on reading and writing words.  We're reading and writing words like "the" "at" and "mat".  We only work on reading words that we've studied the letters in our class.  Even though they may know all of the letters and letter sounds it is difficult to learn to read so isolating a few letters and slowly adding on more is the best approach to take. I always have readers point at the letters with their fingers so I know (and they know) where they're looking and what words they're working on. We always sound it out slow and then move to reading the word quickly.  Even though they're able to memorize the mini books that we're reading we need to practice the actual reading of the words.

 After snack time we got to wash the dishes in the sink and run through the bubbles on the rug.

 We spent a portion of our day outside.  Each child got their own container of bubbles and got to practice blowing them.  We had oodles of fun and are learning so much!

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.