Hearts - Wednesday Preschool

We started preschool this morning playing the piano (we're working on "Hot Cross Buns") and playing the hopping game. 

 There are hearts on the floor in a path to the refrigerator where kids pick up a heart and go back to the beginning.  We hop along the hearts saying the number that we're standing on put our heart back on the fridge when we get there and pick a new one.  It's a great game to get them counting over and over.  The large motor hopping is exciting for them and they're learning number recognition at the same time!

 Then we headed downstairs and read the book "The Day it Rained Hearts."  It is a great introduction to the Valentine's season and we all worked on making a Valentine after the story.

 We cut and hole punched...

 ...and colored and glued...

 ... we traced and created wonderful Valentines.

Snack time was carrots and celery with two different types of dip (almond butter and salad dressing). 

 After snack we took advantage of the wonderful weather and had "recess" outside for a bit.

 One of the prominent games during our outside time was building a house for the "pet" (pretend) baby jaguar.

 Though we focused on the characteristics of hearts today we also talked about squares.

 We determined that you can't roll a square but you can work together to build a house from them.

 At the end of the day we played with the parachute and shape beanbags.

 We had to identify any beanbags that fell off the parachute before they could go back on and we could shake it again.

 I am so impressed with preschool b these days.  They are picking up on long vowels much easier than I had anticipated. We did a long and short "e" picture sort today.  It went home in their backpacks so you can play it again for homework.

 We have been playing "The Dragon Game" this week in school.  A new copy went home in backpacks for you to play at home as well.  It's a fun game for practicing sight words.

 We watched "When Two Vowels go Walking" from "Between the Lions".  I think the song is super cute and it got the point across that when two vowels are together in a word the first one is long and the second one doesn't say anything.

 We drew pictures of our favorite things to do and learn.

 We then wrote words to match our pictures.

 Playing the piano after snack time.

 We're still working on numeral recognition.  Some are working on 0-10 and some are working on 0-50.

Hearts - Tot School Tuesday

Today was such a fun day in school.  We loved playing with the hearts theme.  When the day started we had heart button snakes out.  I sewed a felt heart to one end of a ribbon and tied the other end to a large bead.  I had cut about a zillion felt hearts with a small slit in the middle for them to be buttoned/laced onto the ribbon. 

 We also had play dough out with lots of heart shaped cookie cutters.

 We played way past the start of snack time with these two activities.  They were so engaged and I didn't even notice the time go by.

 Yummy snack of crackers and oranges.

 Next we pulled out shape stamps and the large stamp pads.  We made pictures in our journals.

 CJ continued working with the play-dough through snack time and later into the day.  I realize now that I haven't made play-dough in quite a while...

 Our next challenge was to make heart finger puppets.  I had a bunch of pre-cut paper hearts and pulled out the glitter glue for kids to decorate with.

 They turned out so cute!

Giggles and Gumdrops - Monday Preschool

Today we learned about the letter G. I started by reading some books about giggles and we were all laughing right away.  We broke into reading groups and enjoyed some time rereading the books we read together and practicing our reading skills. Each child came home with a page of blends.  There are pictures with a consonant blend (like "gr") and the word printed below the picture (like "green").  We have been learning that good readers make the sounds of the letters they see.  Please help them to practice saying and reading the blended consonants. 

 Yummy snack time of yogurt and apples.

 We made a graph of our gumdrops after snack.  We lined them all up and colored underneath them so we could remember how many of each color we got.

 After we were done graphing our gumdrops we pulled out the toothpicks and got right to work building the best towers we could.

 We're diving into identifying, sorting and classifying 2D shapes today.  Can you guess the shape of the day?  That's right!  Circles!

 We used circle cereal to make circle shapes around pictures of circular foods.

 We learned that circles don't have straight sides, corners or angles.  They are round and curved.

 Yay!  It's February!  We practice counting every day and we even sing a day's of the week song.  Have they sung it to you yet?

 Afternoon preschool started with learning about long vowel e words.  We learned that you can have two e's together or an e and an a together to make the long e sound in words.

 Art today consisted of foam animal masks and a lot of glue.

 Sorting our long and short e words.  There are some words that contain phonics that I haven't taught the kids yet (such as knee with a silent k at the beginning).  When these words come up I tell them the word and ask them to identify if it has a long or short e in the word.  We also talked about short words like "me" "we" "she" and "he" having a long e sound at the end of the word even though it only contains one vowel.

 We've started playing a dragon sight word game to work on our sight words.  They love reading the dragon words!