Working with Word Families

Today in preschool we reviewed the letter O.  We spent time using the letter O in two common word families: -ot and -op.  The goal was to make as many words as we could and figure out how they are the same and different from the opposite word family.  As we talk about letters and sounds in words we're drawing attention to the sounds in the beginning, middle and end.  The word "top" came up so we took a little break to play with tops on the tables.  As kids worked on a word family sorting page (after I had worked through it with the whole group) I was able to read one-on-one with each child and I have to tell you that these kids are doing fantastic!  It's not common to teach 4 year olds how to read in a preschool setting, but I LOVE watching the light in their eyes as they recognize that they are readers and are in charge of their own brain power to accomplish a difficult task.

 We're continuing talking about passions and interests of each child and spent our writing time practicing our clock letters while we were drawing and writing about our favorite things.

As promised, the Guess My Secret Rule game was back again with new options.  We added size and thickness (fat like a hamburger, skinny like a lettuce) to our options for rules.  It made the game quite a bit more challenging but we're getting the hang of it!

New Basement

Ok, I admit, I teased you about posting pictures of our awesome new school room and then I didn't post them.  Now a month later I'm catching up!  Yay!  We are having a fantastic time in our new school room with both the Preschooler and my own kiddos in our homeschooling adventure!  We took out a wall, added a TON of bookshelves (which means my boys have been reading so much more on their own now that they can get books by themselves), and made a nice little nook for the SMART Board.  We're loving it!  Thanks for pardoning our dust over the summer!

Guess My Secret Rule - a Comparing and Classifying Preschool Math Game

Guess My Secret Rule is one of my favorite games to teach preschoolers.  It introduces comparing and classifying language into our math day in such a fun way.  There are a few rules to this game.  Each person builds their own "sets".  Each set needs 4 blocks.  Within those 4 blocks three of them have to be the same and one has to be different.  Then they get to ask anyone in the room to guess their secret rule by telling which one doesn't match.  Once the person guesses the builder of the set has the most important question to ask, "Why?".  Then the guesser has the opportunity to describe the characteristics that match or don't match.  Today we played with pattern blocks, which gives the game a very small framework of choices for things that match (color and shape).  Next week we'll start playing with attribute blocks were descriptors like size, shape, color, and thickness will also be in play.

The sound isn't great, but I just had to capture the kids doing such a fantastic job at this game today:

We also continued our work on writing clock letters (focus on lowercase a today).  

 Sharing our work is one of the best ways to get kids to talk about themselves and develop the confidence to share and learn from each other.

 Our reading lessons today were so much fun with glitter sight words and success in reading and blending!

 Keep up the great work at home!

Growing Our Muscles!

You just can't plan for these things in the classroom... Today we spent almost the whole time talking about growing our muscles, including our brains.  It started out with a child saying his hand was too tired to practice writing any more. My gut reaction was filled with enthusiasm, "GREAT! That means you're growing your muscles!" Promptly EVERYONE in the class had tired hands, legs and heads.  Thus, the conversation of growing muscles continued throughout the day.  "Shh!! Watch! He's growing his brain!" was said more than once as a child was demonstrating or sharing with the group.  It was so much fun!

 Today we reviewed the letter P and added the sight word "ball".  The kids had so much fun "taking a picture" mentally of the word so they could remember it.  We also continued our conversation about clock letters practicing the letter C.  In math we're wrapping up our number sense unit and had the opportunity to play a few games again.  We made ten frames with Q-tips, tornadoes made our base ten blocks get thrown all around and they needed sorting back onto decimal street, we built the 1-20 chart and made chains 20 links long.

It was such a fun day of learning!

Persistent Learners

Today in preschool we talked about being persistent A LOT.  We jumped right in to work on sorting sight words with do-a-dot markers and then moved to cutting and gluing to make a 15 chart.

 There was much conversation about how the 15 chart was difficult.  It was tricky figuring out what number goes where and which direction to place the number. Often times the first time you do something it isn't easy but with practice it gets easier.  As long as we are PERSISTENT and KEEP TRYING we are GROWING OUR BRAINS!  Isn't that exciting?

 During our writing time today we jumped back into forming clock letters.  We only talked about the letter O today but we did make a capital (mommy) and a lowercase (baby) attempt.  Imagine a clock.  When we write circle shaped letters (imagine the letter "o") we start at the 2 o'clock and go counterclockwise around the clock and back to the 2.  We do the same for letters like "a" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, then straight down), "d" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, straight up to the top and straight down to the bottom).  Clock letters include: a, c, d, f, g, o, s, q.  These letters all start at the "2 o'clock" (the f starts at the 2 on the top clock).  This is an important habit to encourage at home.

 The kids were thrilled when I told them they would get to watch a movie.  Shouts of "Iron Man" and "Blues Clues" were offered up as suggestions.  Instead, we watched Steve.  He's the man in the Math-U-See curriculum videos.  We watched about 3 minutes of his segment about "Decimal Street".  Then we played the decimal street tornado game.  Each child got a page with a drawn decimal street and some unit and tens blocks.  We would all make tornado noises and mix up all the blocks.  Then when the tornado ended we had to put the units back in the units house and the tens back in the tens house.

After playing the tornado game the kids were let in on a little secret.  When we write the quantity of blocks in each house it writes the same number as there are blocks!  I explained it in more appropriate 4 year old language and we built the numbers 1-12 on the white board as we were talking through the concept.

These kiddos certainly worked hard as persistent learners today.  Great work everyone!

Who We Are: An Interest Led Day

Who We Are: An inquiry into the passions and interests of each child and developing an understanding of being bucket fillers through developing friendships. 

We began our day reviewing the letters we've learned (or reviewed) for the year already.  We've talked about the sight words we've introduced (the, a, I, my) and practiced using our reading strategies.  We are taking a mini break from adding letters this week and dove into interest led reading.  I utilize a site called ReadingA-Z.com where I can print books for kids.  Each child shared an interest and I did my best to find a book that supported that interest.  Then everyone was handed a yellow marker to highlight all the words that they could read in the story.  Some books were the "just right" reading level for the child and they could read all or almost all of the words.  Some books were too difficult and the child could mark only a portion of the words.  Find the book in your child's binder and help them read it if necessary.  If it's a too hard book, use it as a companion reading book.  That's where the adult reads all the words not highlighted and the kids read the words that are highlighted.  It gives the kids access to text that is interesting to them through your support.  Those books do not need to be returned to school.

 Then we turned to our body maps.  Our body maps are a growing collage of images that represent the things that are most important to us.  Having a lot of experience now following "how-to-draw" pages we found pages that represent things that are interesting to the kids and drew them on our body maps.  We also talked about drawing people so we could draw our families and friends.

 Side note: I have a USA map with 4 clocks representing the time zones and I totally freaked out when I looked up and saw that it was 5 after 3 and we were over time already.  Thankfulness then took over as I realized that I had referenced the wrong clock.  Phew!

 As we continue our work on number sense we've started playing with the 100 chart.  Right now we're only working on the numbers 1-20.  The first game the kids found super easy.  I pulled out all but a couple cards in the 1-20 section and then handed one card at a time to a child to put back in its correct home.  Our second game started the same way with the majority of the cards 1-20 being "blown" out of their "homes".  This time, however, I lined up the cards (out of order) on the floor and asked kids to find a certain number.  Using phrases like, "Raise your hand if you can tell me what number comes before 3." and "Raise your hand if you can tell me what number comes after 15." the kids took turns finding the correct number and putting it back where it goes.  This turned out to be MUCH harder than the first game.  For both games I always asked something like, "How did you know the number 16 went there?" or "How did you figure out what card you needed to pick up?"  These questions encourage mathematical language and kids begin to build a vocabulary around number sense.  Try to play games like this at home if you can!

Preschool 9-17-15

Today in preschool B we introduced the reading of two new letters: I and L.  We also learned the sight word "my" and "I".  We seemed to hit our level of understanding at this point with most the kids in the class and will spend some time working on blending and reading with the letters that we've reviewed up to now (MTASBHCIL) before moving on.  Please have your child read their reading book 3x each day and practice sounding out the words on the inside front cover if it's an Amazing Action Alphabet book.

 For writing today we continued our "learn to draw" lesson.  We're pulling pages from a simple drawing book to practice using shapes to draw what we love.  As we dig deeper into passions we'll work on drawing something that we love (or more than one thing) on our body maps.

 For math today we played a game called "Grab It". We each grabbed a handful of pompoms, made a guess about how many pompoms we had in our hand and then counted them out.  It was very telling which children can count 1-to-1 up to 20 and which really struggled.  It's an easy activity to practice at home.

 We also colored our counting to 20 sheets.  The goal was to color each box a different color.  Then as we count to 20 we touch each square to say the number.  Next week we'll begin talking about tens and units so at the end of the day today we had some time to free play with the base ten blocks that we'll be using in our upcoming lessons.