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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Wednesday Preschool - Zoo Animals

We had so much fun today learning more about the letter Z and zoo animals.  I didn't put the blow up zoo animals out on Monday hoping that they'd be more engaging after they'd played with the other zoo items we had around.  They turned out to be a hit!  
 We also had the little finger puppets out still and due to a dump truck toy being left out by my boys the night before a new game appeared... feeding the blow up animals the finger puppet animals.  The tiger finger puppets were the big blow up tigers food, the elephants were the elephant food, and so on.  The truck became the transport and sorting center.  (and no, I would have never thought to leave out a truck on purpose, what creative kids!)

 We have been working on shared reading throughout the year.  A shared reading is when everyone has a copy of the text and is responsible for following along and I read out loud.  On Monday we paused before reading the text on every page and did a word/letter hunt in the text for words/letters that we know.  I love doing shared readings because there are so many skills that simply need a repetitive practice to master.  Some of these skills we're working on include: holding the book the correct way (upright and forward), turning one page at a time, following directions and staying on the same page as a group.  Today's shared reading was a great success as kids were monitoring themselves and offering to assist their neighbors if they got lost.  It is so heartwarming to watch how they interact at this time of the year.  They've grown together as a school family.

 VB decided to put a stool right next to my rocking chair and wanted to be my helper all day.  It was so cute.
 During our music time all of the blow up animals were invited to sing along with us.  I can't believe how great our class is at our program songs already.  They picked them up so quickly.  Be sure that you've marked your calendar for our end of year BUG celebration to watch their cute performance.
 Drawing our favorite zoo animals.

 We've been working on recognizing the numerals 0-10 and got to play on Starfall.com today on the SMARTBoard.  Every child got to take a turn picking a number and completing the activities that went along with it.
 Working on our puzzles.
 These two boys were so creative.  One was a tiger (ZR) and one was a bear (CJ).  They were piling up the blow up animals on this bench and then they "Needed to eat meat!" so they'd rambunctiously pretend to eat all the animals.  Okay, now that I type it it sounds gruesome  but when they were playing it I thought it was quite ingenious.
 Afternoon preschool moved on to reading a level C book called "Sherman Sure Is Shy" from ReadingA-Z.com after playing outside for the first 15 minutes of the day (it was so warm and we couldn't resist!).
 We talked about the definition of a character and described Sherman's thoughts, feelings, and actions.
 I thought today's math activity was going to be incredibly awesome and engaging.  I was wrong. :( They weren't very interested in matching the numerals to the images of the numbers and the puzzles (being only 6 pieces) weren't difficult to put together without paying attention to the numbers.  It also turned out to be not such a great printable due to the images of the numerals.  I didn't notice before we started playing with it that the base ten blocks weren't separated in the ones category, they were rods just like the tens.  I think it ended up more confusing than anything.  Oh well.  We'll try a different activity next week.

 We did more studying about worms, their body parts and habitats since we'll be doing our mud and worms day on Monday.  Be sure to watch your email for details about that, it's sure to be a messy day!

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