Sight Words and Base Ten Practice

We had such a focused day today in preschool.  All the kids are working on their own set of sight words so I pulled out our iPads and set them up on TeachMe: Kindergarten.  I LOVE this app.  As the teacher or parent you can select what topics you want the kids to practice and how many correct answers they need to earn a reward.  I always choose 9 correct answers (the highest amount) and adjust the topic according to what we are working on.  Today I made it so they were only practicing the sight word list that was appropriate.  The kids LOVED having their turn practicing their sight words and it made it super easy for me to work with the reading groups.

We are still learning about tens and units and how they represent written numerals.  Today the goal was to play a matching game for the numbers 1-12.  It is so important to remember that different kids pick up ideas in different ways and at different speeds.  This game was fun for some but boring for others.  Some kids sped through it and others needed to take their time.  However, all were successful.  I was excited to find that three of our kids today were ready to work on the full set of numbers 1-20.  I sent home the cards to practice, but please send them back because we'll be working on them on Thursday!

I feel like we really hit a great groove today in school.  We have 3 reading groups now.  One is working on reading comprehension and long vowels, another is working on the second set of sight words and will start long vowels soon, and the third is mastering the first set of sight words.  It was so nice to have lessons that matched exactly for each student today.  Yay!  We spent time writing in our journals and then moved into math.  Today we only had one Decimal Street tornado before we built the numbers 1-20 one at a time on our Decimal Street pages.  It's still a very tricky concept to understand place value and how when you have ten units they can't all fit in the unit's "house" so they have to be traded in for a stick of ten.  We'll keep working through it and hopefully tens and units will make sense soon!

Decimal Street Tornadoes

Today was filled with mini assessments and finishing up past reading units and book sets that we've been working on for a while.  Now we're more organized and ready to start next Thursday with new reading goals that are appropriate for each child.  We had a fun birthday celebration and then moved on to working with tens and units.  I love how Math U See introduces tens and units in their Primer book (certainly a great curriculum for preschool and kinder homeschool kids).  We watched a short segment of the DVD from the curriculum and learned about Decimal Street.  On Decimal Street there are houses for each place value.  The house at the far right is for the units (or ones).  They are the little square blocks.  The house next to it (on the left) is for the tens (or rods or sticks).  We can add more houses later, but this is as far as we go for now.  Each child got their own print out of Decimal Street and a few Base 10 blocks (tens and units).  Then came the tornadoes.  We made tornado noises as we scrambled up all the blocks.  When the tornado ended we had to put everyone back into their correct houses.  It's such a fun way to start sorting through tens and units!