Preschool B - On A Schedule

Can you believe it?  We actually accomplished everything I was hoping to accomplish today in preschool B.  Yay!  It always feels better when we figure out our schedule and I figure out the right amount of material to prepare for a class.  Of course, throughout the year we'll be mixing it up a bit and sorting it out again, but for now it's the beginning of a smooth learning time!  

Our morning group reading lesson continued with discussion about sounding words out (blending them) like people and not robots.  

 We were able to then work through our reading groups mastering the skill of blending and working on appropriate phonics for each group.

 The kids were fantastic in their center rotations as we worked on puzzles and went fishing for letters.

 Our writing time today was technically drawing time.  Many kids started off this year with a blanket statement like: "I can't draw." "I can't do that." "I can't make a circle."  With this negative attitude we aren't getting anywhere with writing letters.  So instead we're drawing shapes.  We have a new "How to Draw with Simple Shapes" book in our classroom and each person picked out an item they wanted to draw.  We did quite a few as a group and then I made copies of the pages and hung them up all over the room for the kids to practice.  For the first time a couple of the resistant writers took a chance and tried.  Yay!  I sent home each child's printed page from the book in the back of their binder.  PLEASE let them practice drawing their picked item over and over again.  We'll talk on Thursday about how practice helps us get better.  PLEASE encourage them to draw a TON this week.  It really will help their writing.

 Continuing our work on drawing and writing:

 For math today I introduced ten frames for the first time.  Each child got a ten frame sheet, a Q-tip and an ink pad to stamp the correct number of dots in each ten frame.  You'll find ten frame activities starting to show up in their homework as well.  We're working on our number sense - recognizing groups of items represent the numeral and the word.

 One of the ways we work on this recognition is through a subitization game of puzzles.  As a class we sorted through the puzzle pieces and made 10 little puzzles representing each number.

I was really impressed with the kids today and their strive to help each other, accomplish the tasks I asked of them, and really work hard.  They did a fantastic job!

Bucket Filling Reading Friends

What an awesome day of preschool we had!  It was absolutely amazing!  We started our day off reading "How Full is Your Bucket? for Kids".  I LOVED reading this with our class.  We had great discussions about how we can't see our bucket or other's buckets but we can feel them with our emotions.  It's similar to not being able to see air, but when you blow on your hand you can feel it.  We added the words "Bucket Fillers" and "Friends" to our "Who We Are" chart hanging on the wall.  As we continue to broaden the language we can use to describe ourselves we keep adding to the chart.

 Next we had a fantastic lesson about blending sounds.  Many of the kids know all of their letter names and sounds and we are all ready to master the blending aspect of putting words together.  We worked through the first few books of the Amazing Action Alphabet together.  These are a great tool for beginning readers.  Even the kids who can read most of the words almost instantly are able to learn and practice the act of blending sounds into words.

We really focused on blending the first sound into the second one.  Another way to phrase that is to "not stop the first sound until your mouth is making the second sound."  We spent many a moment laughing hysterically at Miss Amanda's impression of a robot reading.  Just in case you were wondering, teaching a robot to read is REALLY HARD!  However, teaching a PERSON to read when they can blend one sound into the next is super easy! Note to parents: YES, it will still take A LOT of time for your new reader to be fluently reading chapter books.  However, celebrate the blending today and continue working on it!

I put together a little video of how I want the kids to read their Amazing Action Alphabet books from the Baggy Book.  Please be kind - it's not a professional movie.  (See this type of lesson in action from last year here.)  It's amazing how using the strategy of blending each word slowly, then saying it quickly, then rereading the whole sentence fluently sets kids up for successful reading strategies in the future.

Mid reading lesson we got our wiggles out by "Dancing the Robots out of us" to some robot music and sharing about our teddy bears and their names with our classroom buddies.  The teddy bear name thing connects to the Letter B book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We went through all of these readers last year with these kids as 3 year olds and this year we're  reviewing them in quite a speedy manner.

 After our incredibly successful reading lesson we only had 15 minutes of our class time left together so we spent it enjoying each other's company and playing with blocks and trucks.  It was amazing to watch these kids light up when they blended the sounds together and successfully read a word.  I loved it!

Creative Learning in Preschool B

After our first week of school we are all ready to dive in working on blending letters again.  We started the day off playing with the word factory on Starfall.com on the SMARTboard.  We then read, "The Way I Act" again as a class to talk about all the words that we want to use to describe ourselves.  As we talked about the words that describe ourselves we started talking about things we love, things we like to do, and what we like to think and talk about.  This led right into our body maps.  We worked cooperatively to trace each other's outlines on huge sheets of paper.  Then we worked diligently to add symbols that represented who we are.  We're going to keep working on our body maps in school for another day or two to keep adding things that represent us.

 We had a great time learning the sight word "the" (or reviewing it) and talking about picture clues.  We are going to dive headfirst into our reading strategies on Thursday and picture clues is one of the strategies we can use.  Today we read, "Harold and the Purple Crayon" for our writing time.  As we started writing last week there was a lot of "I don't know how..." and "I can't do that..." when presented with their writing notebooks.  Through the story of Harold we talked about different ways to be creative, imaginative, and represent the ideas in our heads and hearts during writing time.

 I love that the kids get a chance to share their writing at the end of writing time.  There is so much good that comes from the opportunity to share one at a time about something that you created.  It also gives me a way to listen in to their thinking about what they were drawing and writing so I can make notes on the page when I date it at the end of writing.  Though we didn't have time to get to music (again...) we did have about 3 minutes before parents came and were able to build with the blocks and trucks for a short time.

I love how creative this class was today!  I hope we can continue building on the positive energy around learning and identifying ourselves as curious, responsible, compassionate, brave, trustworthy, friendly, persistent, respectful, cooperative, capable, active, considerate and imaginative!

Preschool 9-3-2015

We had a great second day of preschool B today.  We started off the same and kept the activities very similar to day one to focus on the routine and expectations in the classroom.  After playing on the SmartBoard we reviewed our class expectations and then read a book called "The Way I Act".  I LOVE this book because it highlights good qualities in a high quality poem like format.  It helped us talk about the type of people we want to be.  Then we reviewed what centers was supposed to look like and got to work.

 During centers I met with the small guided reading groups.  We had so much fun.  We were learning about blending letters for the first time, blending the beginning into the middle sound, and were practicing our early readers with sight words and CVC phonics.

 After we cleaned up (which they did phenomenally well) we read a book about drawing pictures and writing words to match.  We talked again about how we draw in the empty space and write on the lines.  We discussed the lines and how we use them with our letters.  We also had a mini lesson about how to draw people.  We talked about using circles for the head, eyes and body and using lines for the mouth, arms and legs.  Some kids drew a person for the very first time today and it was adorable!

 After writing we got to play some math games.  We warmed up with our staircases game and then moved to building towers.  They loved building towers and the math language that came out of it was amazing.  I love that I caught the two girls comparing their towers of 6 to make sure they were the same length.  They cooperatively worked on building all the towers they could on their sheet until they ran out of blocks.  Then they started again.  I love how great they worked together!  The environment in our classroom is wonderful, there is so much compassion and desire to learn.  Keep up the great work!

Preschool Day 1

What a fantastic first day of preschool B 2015!  We hit the ground running talking about who we are from our inquiry block.  We shared our favorite colors and started a list of words to describe ourselves.  So far we have "Learners" and "Readers" on the list.  A great start!  We spent some time talking about expectations after we had our "Who We Are" list started.  We talked about how expectations are rules and we shared ideas about why they are important.  We came up with the following reasons for having expectations: *So we can learn *So we can stay safe *So we can all be happy.  What a great list.  Next came our class expectations or rules.  We decided on the following: *Treat things nicely *Treat people nicely.  Using this language we were able to go throughout our day discussing how to treat things and people nicely within the task we were set out to do.  

The first task at hand was learning about centers.  We've never really done "Centers" before in preschool.  I've always had activities for kids to do as I work with small reading groups.  This year I'm making them into more formal centers where we set a timer and rotate from activity to activity.  They did great at picking up the routine.  We went fishing for letters and sang the song about their name and sound when we caught a letter.  We played puzzles and we worked in small reading groups.

 We jumped right into what good readers do (use their eyes to look at letters, point at letters, say the letter sounds, and listen to letters).  We are working on reading books, blending letters into words, and combining sight words and simple phonics within stories.  After our reading and centers time we did a "Jumping Contest" where I play a song and the kids can jump around the room without touching or talking and get their wiggles out. The sofa turned out to be a great centerpiece for a "jumping race track" around the room and when the song was done they were all lined up!

 Next we moved into writing.  We talked about the way to hold a pencil, that we don't turn pages since we only work on one page per day, we draw pictures on the top empty space and letters/words on the lines below.  We also started talking about the way to form letters.  We talked about what lines are on writing paper (sky line, airplane line, baseline, worm line).  We talked about how letters start at the #2 position on the clock and work their way around (not all of them, but we worked on letter a today).  Then we drew and wrote.  It is always so fun to see from the first day of school to the last week of school how much they grow during this 4 year old year.  I love it!

At the end of the day we learned how to play "Staircases".  It's a number sense game that I love.  We roll the dice and then make a step with that many blocks.  We keep rolling the dice until we have steps 1-6 to make a staircase.  If the roll is a number we already have we simply roll again.

With all these great activities the kids went home already reading and playing math games.  Try to read and play at home so we can keep the momentum going and build upon these concepts on Thursday.  Happy learning!

Back to School Photos

Miss K did a fantastic job with our back to school photos this year.  I try to hire a professional photographer at least once a year to take pictures of the kids and then I gift the digital files to the parents.  This morning I sent all preschool parents the photos of their child and now I get to share them with you.  Happy back to school photos! These will be the delightful 8 that you'll get to watch grow and learn all year long...

A Deeper Look Into Inquiry Blocks

We had a fantastic back to school day today and afterwards I received an email requesting more information about the inquiry blocks we'll be talking about.  It is a bit of an abstract idea, not nearly as concrete as studying a topic or theme per day like the last 3 years has been with these kids.  So I decided that I'd put the ideas in my head down in writing and share the details with everyone.

This year, in both Preschool and Kindergarten, we'll be spending approximately 6 weeks working through an inquiry block. The blocks include:

• Who We Are
• Where We Are In Place And Time
• How We Express Ourselves
• How the World Works
• How We Organize Ourselves
• Sharing the Planet

These ideas are very vague and are so intentionally.  As we start talking about a subject one idea or another may stick as a highly interesting subject for the class and we have the ability to stay with the idea until we have exhausted it or stumble upon something else more interesting.  In my Kindergarten Yearly Scope I have defined each of these blocks as:

• Who We Are
• Inquiry into noticing and naming, identity and passions, relationships and cultures including families, friends, and communities.  A focus on how families and friends are important and help each other. 
• Where We Are In Place And Time
• Inquiry into personal and family histories; advances in communications (letter, telegraph, house phone, cell phone, computer phone). Past, present, future: yesterday, today, tomorrow.
• How We Express Ourselves
• Inquiry into the ways we express ourselves through ideas, feelings, appearances, actions and the arts. A focus on the many ways to tell a story.
• How the World Works
• Inquiry into different kinds of materials and how they change. A focus on water and temperature causing changes, being scientists and researchers to make and test guesses, using senses to make observations.
• How We Organize Ourselves
• Inquiry into the jobs people do and how organizations are developed to address the needs and wants of a community. A focus on the classroom community and jobs that need to be done to keep our environment clean and a safe place to learn. 
• Sharing the Planet
• Inquiry into resources (elements) on Earth. Needs and wants of all living things and how they are connected to other living things and their environment. 

Kindergarten and preschool will vary throughout the year as each class will latch upon different key ideas and desire to focus on differing aspects of the inquiry block.

The ideas floating around preschool are far from concrete.  I have an umbrella of projects and will be looking for the interest-led spark that will lead our discussions, impact our writing and art and show up in our science lessons.

In preschool this year you can expect some, but not all, of the following ideas to be explored:

• Who We Are
• Conversations about being "Bucket Fillers" and developing friendships.  
• Passions and interest of each child.
• Where We Are In Place And Time
• How things haven't always been the way they are today and things will change in the future.
• Possible exploration of communication and its changes over time.
• Exploration of family in terms of siblings, parents and grandparents.
• Vocabulary: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
• How We Express Ourselves
• A study on emotion and actions/reactions.
• Color and Music
• Friends/Bucket fillers
• Telling stories
• How the World Works
• Magnets
• Simple Machines
• Properties of water at different temperatures
• Plants
• Insects
• How We Organize Ourselves
• Community helpers: firemen/police/librarians, etc.
• Jobs we do around our homes and in school to help out: cleaning up messes, sharpening pencils, setting the table
• Responsibility for one's self
• Sharing the Planet
• Space
• Friends/Bucket Fillers
• Treating animals and property with respect
• Serving others to help impact a positive environment 

I am really excited to explore these ideas within our preschool class as we continue learning to read and understand the world around us.  I hope you follow along on our journey of exploration!