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!

Opera and Vehicles

What a fantastic morning of school! We started the day off working on writing our names.  It is a goal for all of my 3 year olds to be able to write their name by mid February with the final push being writing their names for their Valentine cards.  If your child can write their first name already go ahead and start working on the last name.  If they can't write their name yet, start with the first letter and practice it over and over.  Then add the second letter and practice those two in a row over and over.  Repeat the process until they can write their name.  Then we worked on the letter O and sang along to "Carmen" (an opera) with the /o/ sound.

 We had a fun snack of sweet peppers and popcorn and then moved onto art.  It was great fun to paint with corn syrup!  I love how shiny the pictures look.  We also got to play the piano a little bit, looking at groups of 2 black keys and 3 black keys.  We finished up our graphing unit today with a little cut and paste activity.  The kids did great!  Now we are ready to move onto patterning! 

 This afternoon was a ton of fun as well.  I think my favorite part was when they were telling their own jokes at snack time.  They were jokes like, "Why did the chicken cross the cow?  Because a bird held popcorn in its face!"  They were completely hilarious!

We got right into reading today, practicing the letter R with the Amazing Action Alphabet mini book.  The kids are doing fantastic at sounding out the words.  We also played with cars, trucks and blocks to go along with the vehicles theme.

 We found a page all about vehicles in our encyclopedia and marked all the words that each child should be able to read completely on their own.  Hopefully at home you are companion reading these pages and reading all of the hard words for them and letting them read the marked words.

For math we learned all about spheres.  We talked about how circles are flat and spheres are shaped like balls.  We had a few ramps set up in the room and experimented with rolling spheres and circles down the ramps.  It was super awesome!  During art time we drew pictures and added words.  This seems like a simple activity, but it should be done LOTS at this stage.  The spelling doesn't have to be correct, the grammar doesn't need to be correct, they just need to see themselves as writers writing letters to match their pictures.  If you child has the opportunity to draw at home please encourage them to add words to match.  When they ask you to spell a word ask them what sound it starts with and encourage them to write the sounds they hear.

What a fantastic day!  I look forward to seeing everyone again on Wednesday!

Vehicles 2-25

We had so much fun learning letter R and all about vehicles.  We played with all the road signs and made our own steering wheels.  They loved driving around all the shapes on the floor (made of painters tape).  While driving on each shape they walked the outline and said the name of the shape over and over again.  We also got to "drive our race cars" by saying /r-r-r/ and running around the cones set up as a track.  For art we enjoyed painting with cars!

 We gave all the cars a bath in the sink after playing with them in the paint.  We had a fun game where we had to sort all of the attribute blocks into the correct shape on the floor.  We worked on our shapes song and played with the parachute and shape beanbags.  We had such a fun day!