Trains

What a fabulous review day we had!  We dressed up as train engineers and played with the wooden train sets.  We read oodles of books about trains, their history and the different types of trains.  We practiced the all of the letters we've already learned with our St. Patrick's Day train printable.  I'm so impressed with these kiddos that are picking up their alphabet and utilizing it to begin reading.  Keep up the great work at home!

We also made a cute train craft that involved cutting and coloring.  I'm bummed I didn't snap a picture of a finished train.  We continued working on writing our names with a focus on specific troublesome letters.  Math was so much fun as we started learning about coins.  Today we focused on the penny.  We sang songs about the penny and its characteristics.  Preschoolers really love learning about money!

Preschool St. Patrick's Day

We had a great day in preschool for St. Patrick's Day.  We spent some time really focused on identifying our colors since we spent so much time talking about the color green.  We talked about how many of us were wearing different shades of green.  There is dark green and light green and they are all called green.  We started the day with a big sheet of paper and 2 drops of paint: blue and yellow.  When we mixed and painted we made it into green.  We started learning Mary Had A Little Lamb on the piano and it was quite a struggle for us to master the first line pattern (CBABCCC).  We'll keep working on it, though it will take us longer than we originally planned for.  We also worked on identifying a cylinder with two circles (one on top, one on bottom) and a rectangle that wraps around them.  We continued working on our reading: practicing the short /e/ sound and recognizing lowercase b and d.  We started a new game during our reading time that switches the way we've been looking at the written print.  Instead of looking at the written letter and making the sound it said we said a word (starting with -at) and stretched it in the air (figuratively with our hands).  Then we talked about what sounds we heard /a/-/t/ and wrote down the symbols that represented the sounds we heard.  It's a different strategy that starts representing how we can figure out how to write words.  We had a great day and we're learning lots!

Tot School St. Patrick's Day

It is so fun to learn and play with the St. Patrick's Day theme.  We celebrated a tad early this year simply so we could celebrate before it actually came.  We played with the clover activity on Starfall.com on the SmartBoard and the toddlers got a kick out of the song at the end.  They danced to it and then would play it over and over again.  We read a few books about St. Patrick's Day and really worked on naming colors in our circle time.  (I focused on colors since there was so much green happening throughout the day already.)  We made a fun shamrock art with contact paper and green tissue paper.  We also played with green noodles and green stamps.  A heart shape stamp makes great shamrock leaves.  

Elephants and Circus - Letter E

We had so much fun learning about the letter E today.  We started off by playing with the circus tent, circus finger puppets and face painting.  Everyone wanted to be a clown, which was easy enough.  We simply used watercolors for the face painting.  Using just a small amount of water gives you a thicker paint and it still washes off very easily.  E the Elephant lifts weights, so we practiced our exercising, "e-e-e".

 We're continuing our study of 3D shapes and played with cones and spheres today.  We cut out cone shaped circus tents and practiced an ABC dot-to-dot from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

With the letter E in our knowledge bank we can now read the word bed.  We write the word bed and then outline the letters to make a picture of a bed.  I then draw a little person sleeping on the bed.  I teach a lowercase b and d trick with the word bed.  Simply make two fists and put them together to make your bed.  When you run into a lowercase b or d check your fists and see if the shape matches the b at the beginning or the d at the end of your "bed". Train your preschooler to reference this trick and they'll always be able to determine the lowercase b or d.

Healthy Bodies

We had so much fun in school today!  We talked about how to have a healthy body by exercising, eating healthy, drinking water, and washing our hands.  We practiced reading our letter K Amazing Action Alphabet book, naming our colors and our letter sounds. 

 We practiced our handwriting, drew in our journals all the ways that we can be healthy.  Talked about spheres and cubes with our fun germs printables and danced for exercise.  It was so much fun!

Healthy Bodies

We had a great day talking all about how germs make us sick and how we can get rid of them to stay healthy.  We talked about washing hands, flushing the potty, coughing in our elbows, mopping the floor and putting leftover food in the fridge.  We read lots of books today and had so much fun looking at the pictures of the silly looking germs.  We learned the letter K today with karate kicks.  We each got a sticker for our shirts and talked about healthy body exercise.  The kids really loved making healthy "food" in our play kitchen.  They cooked and sorted all the food and dishes.  We also made 3D shapes out of paper (they have cute germ pictures on them, find them in the tot pack) and built with blocks (as 3D shape introduction).   It was a fantastic day. 

K is for Karate and Healthy Bodies

We had a great day in preschool today learning all about letter K.  We were able to do some one-on-one reading time working on the skills each child specifically needed.  We also played on Starfall.com, on the iPad with the teach me app and did the art project from the Amazing Action Alphabet for the letter K.  Today was an introduction day to 3D shapes.  We used the language: "flat shapes" and "block shapes".