Monday Preschool - Zoo Animals

We had such a fun day in preschool learning all about zoo animals, the letter Z and the numeral 9.

 We happen to have a lot of zoo animal themed toys around our house and we put them to great use today.  We were playing with finger puppets, puzzles and face masks all day!

Here we are working on a shared reading of "Curious George Goes to the Zoo".  Shared reading is when everyone has a copy of the text and follows along, reading together.  It's fantastic for developing the skills needed to turn the book pages correctly and follow along.

The Amazing Action Alphabet has a wonderful activity book with printables for each letter.  Today we worked on Z the Zebra and zipping him in his sleeping bag.

 This math activity turned out really well.  I think we'll be doing it again on Wednesday.  We worked as a whole group first and then individually.  We took a number bean bag and then matched the same number of zoo animals as the numeral on the bean bag told us.  We worked on counting, one-to-one correspondence and numeral recognition.  This is a great extension activity from the TouchMath PreK program.

 Afternoon preschool was awesome.  We had fantastic math and reading lessons and then lots of good old fashioned fun.  They voted to start with math, so we pulled out the base ten blocks.  I have noticed that occasionally they can match the correct blocks, but they can't tell you the name of the number.  Be sure that when you're playing at home you're asking them what the numeral is called.

 We moved up to bigger numbers today (all the way to 99!).

 Reading was great because we've talked about /ou/ and /ow/ before with sight words and other times it has popped up, but today we got to focus on it.  We played games making up silly words (and occasionally a real word would pop in).

 There are two games that they brought home in their reading bags (please return them each day because we'll be adding cards to the games over the next 2 weeks).  One game is an onset and rime game, the other is the dice skating game.  We played both games extensively, but if your child can't remember and you want to play at home please just shoot me a message. All games right now are coming from ReadingA-Z.com

 Our student reading book is harder today simply because it is so much longer than books we're used to reading independently.  Most words are still easily decodable, but there will be a few words your child may stumble on.  Just tell them the word and move on.

 We also played with the animal masks at the end of the day.  It was fun pretending to be all the different animals and playing "chase" or "tag" or "bark at each other really loud".