Preschool Nursery Rhymes 1-28 and 1-30

We had so much fun reviewing the letters we've already learned (MTASBHCILPFJOND) during Nursery Rhyme week.  We stamped and colored, played with magnets, sandpaper letters, Starfall.com and Starfall Speedway.  We started practicing singing the song "Hot Cross Buns" so that we'd be familiar with it while learning to play it on the piano.  

We had such a great week!

Tot School Nursery Rhymes

We had a great time learning all about Nursery Rhymes in tot school.  They loved playing with all the blocks and the stamp pads.  For art we glued cotton balls onto sheep shapes.  We played "Ring-Around-The-Rosies" about a zillion times, no kidding.  It was such a fun day in school!

D is for Dancing

Dancing is such a fun day in preschool.  We turn on music and dance the day away!  We danced like robots, did yoga, the chicken dance, and dressed up in costumes.  We played the piano and enjoyed a variety of different types of music to dance to. 

 Our dancing art was such a hit!  I laid out 3 long strips of paper side by side and dropped splats of paint all over it.  With rolled up pants we danced all over the paper and made such a wonderful group picture!

Dancing Dinosaurs in Tot School

Talk about oodles of fun!  We learned about the letter D by playing with dinosaurs in our indoor sandbox and dancing the day away!  Everyone loved digging and playing with the tot packs and puzzles. 

 We did a fun stamping activity with dinosaur outlines, made dinosaur sock puppets and even did an amount of yoga (that's dancing, right?).  We had so much fun!

Dinosaurs in Preschool!

We had so much fun learning all about dinosaurs!  To beat the winter cold we decided to purchase the sand for our sandbox in January and fill up a swimming pool with it in the living room.  It made for a whole lot of fun for about a week!  The sandbox was filled with dinosaur toys of all sorts as well as paintbrushes for digging.  We read "Dinosaurs Before Dark" and practiced making dinosaur noises all day. 

 We wrote/drew book reports about the story we read before moving on to talk about patterns, practicing the piano, working with puzzles and reading more books.  It was a great day!

Manners

We had so much fun today.  As a review day we got to plug in all the activities that we've missed in the last few weeks.  We got messy and had lots of fun.  The kids really loved the "No, David!" series of books and read them over and over.  We continued working on AB patterns and hope to move to AAB patterns next Tuesday.  

Manners

Tot school this week was all about manners and the letter N.  We had so much fun playing with Starfall.com and the letter N.  The kids LOVED the part where the little boy is swinging a net to try and catch a butterfly.  They played that page over and over again.  They also loved running around with the flip chips using them as "money".  I believe it was raining money on people and the trampoline was the "bank".  We also spent much of the day playing with the peg boards building many towers. 

Manners

We had a great day in preschool today!  It was fun to learn the letter N with manners and "No, David!".  We continued working on AB patterns and are starting to understand the concept.  We also got to paint with nail polish today!  Since it was such a small group I also let them paint their finger nails in addition to the paper.  We had so much fun!

Moms

We had such a fun day in school today!  We learned more about the letter O and Moms.  We talked about all the jobs that moms do and played with the card table play house.  We practiced spelling "MOM" like "YMCA" and we found all the letters around the room that we knew with our "Word Detective" cards. 

 We did a lot of reading and some practice on the piano.  Then we headed to art and learned about drawing our moms.  We talked about the shapes of the different body parts (circle for the head, curved rectangle for the torso, etc.) and then we drew pictures of our moms and wrote the word "mom".

 We also started our first lesson in patterning today.  We had to have some fun free time with the blocks that we haven't been able to play with yet and then they each picked 2 colors (10 blocks of each color) and worked on making an ABAB pattern.  Please make the pattern at home every day.  Then "read" the pattern by saying the names of the colors (green, blue, green, blue, etc.) as well as the corresponding ABAB pattern (A, B, A, B, etc.). Keep up the great work!  We're going to learn so much great stuff this semester!

Moms

We loved talking about Moms and the letter O today.  We even worked on spelling "Mom"!  We played all sorts of mom activities.  The felt play house was a big hit (hangs over a card table).  There are so many pieces like flowers and plants and even a little felt squirrel that ended up climbing on everyone's heads and arms.  It was so fun to play with them. Every time I'd poke my head in the dog door and say "woof, woof" they would squeal with delight :).  I rearranged the room a bit and put the princess mirror where everyone could reach it.  The girls loved checking it out today. 

 We also practiced other jobs that moms do.  We were doctors and nurses and we took care of babies and read books galore!  We had so much fun!

Opera and Talents

Today we learned all about the letter O, Opera and Talents.  We listened to a variety of songs from the album "The World's Very Best Opera for Kids".  We're continuing to practice writing our names and our classroom goal is to have each child be able to write their own first name by mid February.  We loved art time today with corn syrup painting from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We also had our very first piano lesson!  Jan-May we apply what we've been learning in music to the piano.  We talk about patterns and how music is repeated patterns.  We learned today that the keyboard has white and black keys and that the black keys are in sets of 2's and 3's.  When we play the piano we brace our pointer finger with our thumb and only use the pointer finger to play all the notes.  We will not use printed music at all but rather learn through memorizing patterns.  Today was our last day of graphing and the kids did pretty well.  They were each able to cut out the pieces to a graph and put them in the correct location.  some kids struggled with the harder graph when they were to cross of an image and color in a square to represent it.  That's okay though because we're in preschool and all of these items are introductory! 

We loved learning the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  We sang it and acted it out many times with the printable puppets from the Opera and Talents preschool pack. We had a fantastic day and I look forward to being back in a routine without any interruptions now through May!