Gingerbread Friends

I love gingerbread day!  For us it's like gingerbread week.  We started off preschool with some gingerbread coloring, button sorting and playing the Starfall.com gingerbread game on the SmartBoard and on the iPad.

 Our reading lesson today was a whole group lesson.  Everyone received their own copy of "The Gingerbread Man" and we read through it page by page marking the words we knew how to read with highlighter tape.  I love it when kids become engaged in a task like this.  Each one was looking through their copy of the book to find the word "the", "I", or "a".  I think we also found the word "sat" along with a few others.  It's the first step to really knowing that reading happens in the real world and that they're learning to do what the adults are doing.  It's such a fun activity! Even if you're only homeschooling one child I'd recommend that you get them some highlighter tape and let them go to town marking all the words they can read in a book.  Then when you read the book together to adult reads all the big words and the child reads all the highlighted words.

 What's a gingerbread day without decorating and eating some gingerbread cookies?

 We also enjoyed art time with paint and play dough.  It was a fantastic fun filled day!

Gingerbread Friends - Tot School

So I may have taken way too many pictures today, but Gingerbread Friends is one of my absolute favorite days to play in preschool.  We started the day sorting buttons, playing with the Gingerbread Friends tot pack, lacing cards, sorting shapes and reading books. 

 We colored on pre-cut sandpaper gingerbread shapes with cinnamon bark (soak it in really hot water first) and everyone loved how they smelled after.  Once again, I set out the mats for story time and everyone came running over.  I love how excited they get to listen to a story.

 After story time we had healthy snack time (I had made Larabars in gingerbread shapes, they were SO cute!) and then we got to decorate gingerbread cookies.  And eat them of course :)

 It was one of those days when I looked at the clock, saw it was 11:05 and thought that I simply just don't have enough play time in my life.  It ended up that 20 minutes was perfect to finger paint with homemade gingerbread scented finger paints and play with homemade gingerbread scented play dough.  There were a couple activities we had to skip since we didn't go back downstairs, but we had oodles of fun and filled every minute with learning and exploring.  Now, I best go eat my breakfast! (I've been too busy to get to that yet!)

Sharing and Manners

Welcome back!  We enjoyed our first day back after our mini Thanksgiving break.  We spend the first day in December talking about sharing and manners.  As we move into the holiday season it's important to give an upfront reminder about how to appropriately behave.  We played a review letter game to review all 10 letters we've already learned in school.  Make sure you're still reading your mini readers at home every day!  We had a little dance break between the letter activity and story time since we'd been sitting so long.  All the girls held hands and jumped/danced in a circle and little A waved the "I Love You" ASL to her friend little E.  It was so adorable!

 For art we worked on making paper chains.  It was the first time we'd worked on this idea.  We stressed only putting glue on the end of one of the papers and then pressing it to the other end to make a circle.  Many made raindrop shaped chains, a couple of the older kids were able to make circle chains and one didn't connect her loops together but did very neatly line them up :).

 We also made a group family graph to introduce graphing (our December concept) and worked on sorting and classifying shapes.  We're getting better at building our own sets.  We started talking about tempo with the rhythm sticks as we listened to holiday music at the end of the day.  Happy December!

Animals in Winter

We had such a great time in preschool today.  I just love this top picture of all of them in our Bear Den.  They loved playing "Bear Family" and pretending to hibernate in our cardboard box den.  We continued working on letter P today as well as working on our Guess My Secret Rule game.  We read many stories about animals in winter and acted out hibernating and migrating.  They are such cute kids!

Tot School - Animals in Winter

We had such a fantastic day learning all about animals in winter.  We talked about the letter P and loved playing on the SmartBoard Starfall.com game.  We built dens and burrows out of blocks, dressed up in winter clothing and pretended to be animals hibernating in a big cardboard box den.  One of our favorite activities was reading "The Mitten" and acting it out.  As we came to each new character each child got to hold a mask and be that character.  Our favorite part of when the bear sneezes at the end, "ahh, ahh, ahh...choo!" and all the animals flew out of the mitten!

Play Ball!

We had a great day in school today. Our class was a little small due to illness but that just means that we got more one-on-one time than usual.  Our theme was "Play Ball" with the introduction of the letter P and sight word "ball". We read a number of books right away this morning all about baseball. One of my favorites is the Berenstain Bears Play T-Ball.  It describes how to play the game in a very simple story.  After reading all our books we got out the T-ball equipment and got to work playing!

 We had popcorn for snack to go along with the letter P.  After snack time we glued the extra popcorn into P shapes.  We did more baseball reading and enjoyed playing our math game with attribute blocks.  We're still playing "Guess My Secret Rule" where we have a set of 4 objects, 3 have the same attribute and 1 is different.  Kids are working on creating their own sets to try and trick Miss Amanda.  We had a lot of fun playing today!

Scarecrows

We had a fantastic day talking all about scarecrows.  We read stories and non fiction books about scarecrows and then got busy making our own scarecrows.  I love this activity because the scarecrows are completely adorable and the kids work really hard on their coloring and cutting to put it together.  They are so proud of their work when they were done.  Plus, along the way they get to enjoy conversation.  The conversation at the all girls table was about whether or not they each had cup holders in their cars.  It was a very memorable conversation. 

 We continued working on identifying which objects fit into a group and which don't.  Part of that is being able to verbalize "Why".  We've got a handle on the game when there is only one variable changed (all circles, 3 are yellow and 1 is red).  It gets much trickier when more than one variable is different (a triangle, a square, a circle, a rectangle - 3 are blue and one is yellow.  In this case they often say the circle doesn't fit because it's not a square... etc. Where the shape doesn't actually matter but the color is the common denominator).  I'd encourage you to play this game at home with your silverware drawer or your chest of toys, even with your shoes.  Remember there are always 4 objects, 3 of them have the same characteristic and 1 has a different characteristic.

We continued working on our L book by building the pages from it.  We talked about how it was like a puzzle and we had to match the words to the picture.  They got a kick out of fixing incorrect sentences.