I Am Special

Today started a delightful second week of school. Our theme was "I Am Special".  Be sure to scroll down for pictures of our afternoon class about teamwork as well.

After singing our welcome song and reading a book about how special we are we made a class apple tree.  Each person got an apple to write their name on and something about why they are special.  We had answers from, "I am special because I like to read books and play in the sand." to "I am special because I make my mom and dad happy and I make them laugh."  They were super great answers!  I'll leave the tree up for a few weeks and then send apples home.  Click on the picture for a larger size so you can read the answers.

We learned our first letter today.  The letter of the week is M.  We read the story about M the Moose and listened to the song.  Next, I passed out magnifying glasses so all the little detectives in our room could find the letter M.  Here are a few finds: 

 I love having a SMARTBoard in my classroom.  I know it isn't feasible for everyone to have one, which is why all my lesson plans are printables.  We were able to trace the letter M digitally with our fingers or the with a tennis ball.  It was a great first lesson about tracing versus scribbling.

 Art today was a look at how special everyone is.  We traced our names and made fingerprints and hand prints.

We took our artwork back downstairs to use the magnifying glasses to check out our fingerprints and compare them to our neighbors fingerprints.  Everyone has different fingerprints!

 

 Math was exciting as we talked about the quantity of 3.  I used an Ikea toy basket and some beanbags and each person got a chance to throw the correct number of beanbags into the baskets. 

 Music time was all about volume.  We played some stop and go dancing and sang songs really loudly and very quietly.  Kids also had their first chance to explore hand bells.

Preschool B was super quiet today since two of our kids couldn't make it.   We started the day by coloring our watches from The Moffatt Girls.  Today's sight word of the day is "see".  Our topic of the day was Teamwork.  We talked about what a team is and how a team helps each other. 

 We reinforced the letter M and the letter B.

 We continue improving our reading skills by pointing at the words we're reading and tapping out the sounds with our fingers.

 We're also reading books with the sight words we've been working on.

 Today we had a mini writing lesson about how to hold a writing tool and how to trace.

 For music today the kids decided that they wanted to play all of the instruments!

 Art was a bundle of fun exploration.  I have a bunch of art cards that we lay out and together we pick what we'd like to use during art time.  Today we ended up with scissors, glue, foam paper, construction paper, Do-A-Dot markers, glitter and play-dough.

 For snack time we decided to hold off on carrot fries (the gal who requested them last week was gone today).  Instead we made pink lemonade and had raw carrots.

Math time was all about equal quantities and I left my camera upstairs so I didn't get any pictures of it :(.  It was a great day of school!  If you're following along at home please drop me a line in the comments section and let me know your thoughts!