Weather

The weather today was perfect!  It started off a little bit chilly with a little wind.  Then the sun came out and warmed us all up!  It was fantastic to experience the change in weather while we were reading books about it.  We continued working on letter W and drew on the chalkboard again, it was still super exciting for them.  We were on Day 5 of a game called "Learning About Spelling".  Up to this point in the year we've been working on making the sounds of the printed letters to figure out what a word is.  Now we're going a bit backwards.  We say a word (today my funny word was 'op') and then stretch it out to determine what letters we should write down that represent the sounds we made.  Then we added different consonants to the beginning of the word to make new words.  So today we figured out that we can make words like 'stop' 'mop' and 'cop'.  We did a lot of wiggling like W the Worm and even painted a worm brown.  Today was the introduction of the quarter.  We sang the Pocket Song to the tune shortening bread and practiced all 4 coins now.  Remember that coins are just an introduction in preschool and there is no need to master them.  Just understand that there are different coins each with its own worth. 

Tot School Weather

Wow!  What a great week to talk about the letter W with nice weather!  We spent tot school outside for the whole day and had so much fun!  The kids were excited to play with everything they hadn't seen for a few months.  The sandbox and the playhouse were quite popular.  We also played in our weather sensory bin (blue rice, cotton balls, silver pipe cleaners bent like lightening, a felt sun).   

 We had snack on a picnic blanket and ate watermelon.  It was so exciting to them that they were having a picnic!  We made windsocks with streamers and had oodles of fun carrying them around the yard.  One art project that we explored was an equal mixture of shaving cream and liquid glue.  We painted "clouds" with them and they turned out really cool!  While we were waiting for moms to come we each got a straw and got to play the part of 'wind' by blowing around all the clouds (cotton balls) on the hard floor.  It was such a blast!

W is for Wind!

We had such a fun time talking about the letter W and wind today in school.  The weather was nice enough for us to go do much of our class outside.  We learned letter W and got to write it with chalk on the big chalkboards.  It was an experience they haven't had for a while and was so exciting we'll most likely do it again on Thursday.  We made kites for art today and had a blast flying them around.  We also learned about the dime and practiced playing "Mary Had A Little Lamb" on the piano.  It was a great fun day!

Animals in Spring - A Preschool Chick Experience

Wow! Talk about a great day in school!  How fun is playing with baby chicks for the "Animals in Spring" theme?  With the bigger preschoolers we were able to sit in the kiddy pool and let the baby chicks explore.  

 This is a great photo grouping of how nearly everyone reacted.  1. "I'm not certain about this..." 2. "They're climbing on me!" 3. "This is so exciting!" 4. "I love chicks!"  It took a little bit to get accustomed to each other but in the end everyone was happy to have one climb on their lap and be able to pet it.  We even held out little grains of their food for them and loved watching them jump from one person's lap to the next.

 The rest of our day included our lesson in spelling, which is a great activity if you haven't looked into it yet.  Up to this point in the year we've been working on reading words written down.  Now we're talking about how the words that come out of our mouths are just combinations of letters that we can then write down.  Check out the "Animals in Spring" pack for more information. We also did a group reading of "Mouse's First Spring" a book with many little words that the preschoolers can already read.  The bonus is that they each got to keep a copy of the book.  In math we learned about the nickel.  In preschool it's purely introduction and they love it.  We sang our pocket song to "Shortning Bread".  It goes like this: "Which coin is in my pocket, pocket? What's in my pocket worth __ cents? (then they guess what it is and we continue) It's a shiny ____, _____.  It's a ____ worth ___ cent."  The kids love it!

Animals in Spring

We had so much fun in school today talking about animals in spring.  We had our sensory bin with green rice, Easter grass and plastic eggs galore out for exploring.  We also had poker chips and large crayon banks that we sorted the chips according to color into.  Between those two stations everyone was very busy at work until snack time.  We learned "Popcorn Popping" a song about the blossoms on fruit trees looking like popcorn.  

 We also had a few large cardboard boxes out to talk about them as dens and the animals are starting to wake up in spring time. The kids loved eating snack around the baby chicks.  They were so excited about watching their every move!

 We enjoyed popcorn art that went along with our song, read oodles of books and had an enjoyable time playing outside.  Yay for springtime!

Trains

What a fabulous review day we had!  We dressed up as train engineers and played with the wooden train sets.  We read oodles of books about trains, their history and the different types of trains.  We practiced the all of the letters we've already learned with our St. Patrick's Day train printable.  I'm so impressed with these kiddos that are picking up their alphabet and utilizing it to begin reading.  Keep up the great work at home!

We also made a cute train craft that involved cutting and coloring.  I'm bummed I didn't snap a picture of a finished train.  We continued working on writing our names with a focus on specific troublesome letters.  Math was so much fun as we started learning about coins.  Today we focused on the penny.  We sang songs about the penny and its characteristics.  Preschoolers really love learning about money!

Preschool St. Patrick's Day

We had a great day in preschool for St. Patrick's Day.  We spent some time really focused on identifying our colors since we spent so much time talking about the color green.  We talked about how many of us were wearing different shades of green.  There is dark green and light green and they are all called green.  We started the day with a big sheet of paper and 2 drops of paint: blue and yellow.  When we mixed and painted we made it into green.  We started learning Mary Had A Little Lamb on the piano and it was quite a struggle for us to master the first line pattern (CBABCCC).  We'll keep working on it, though it will take us longer than we originally planned for.  We also worked on identifying a cylinder with two circles (one on top, one on bottom) and a rectangle that wraps around them.  We continued working on our reading: practicing the short /e/ sound and recognizing lowercase b and d.  We started a new game during our reading time that switches the way we've been looking at the written print.  Instead of looking at the written letter and making the sound it said we said a word (starting with -at) and stretched it in the air (figuratively with our hands).  Then we talked about what sounds we heard /a/-/t/ and wrote down the symbols that represented the sounds we heard.  It's a different strategy that starts representing how we can figure out how to write words.  We had a great day and we're learning lots!

Tot School St. Patrick's Day

It is so fun to learn and play with the St. Patrick's Day theme.  We celebrated a tad early this year simply so we could celebrate before it actually came.  We played with the clover activity on Starfall.com on the SmartBoard and the toddlers got a kick out of the song at the end.  They danced to it and then would play it over and over again.  We read a few books about St. Patrick's Day and really worked on naming colors in our circle time.  (I focused on colors since there was so much green happening throughout the day already.)  We made a fun shamrock art with contact paper and green tissue paper.  We also played with green noodles and green stamps.  A heart shape stamp makes great shamrock leaves.  

Elephants and Circus - Letter E

We had so much fun learning about the letter E today.  We started off by playing with the circus tent, circus finger puppets and face painting.  Everyone wanted to be a clown, which was easy enough.  We simply used watercolors for the face painting.  Using just a small amount of water gives you a thicker paint and it still washes off very easily.  E the Elephant lifts weights, so we practiced our exercising, "e-e-e".

 We're continuing our study of 3D shapes and played with cones and spheres today.  We cut out cone shaped circus tents and practiced an ABC dot-to-dot from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

With the letter E in our knowledge bank we can now read the word bed.  We write the word bed and then outline the letters to make a picture of a bed.  I then draw a little person sleeping on the bed.  I teach a lowercase b and d trick with the word bed.  Simply make two fists and put them together to make your bed.  When you run into a lowercase b or d check your fists and see if the shape matches the b at the beginning or the d at the end of your "bed". Train your preschooler to reference this trick and they'll always be able to determine the lowercase b or d.

Healthy Bodies

We had so much fun in school today!  We talked about how to have a healthy body by exercising, eating healthy, drinking water, and washing our hands.  We practiced reading our letter K Amazing Action Alphabet book, naming our colors and our letter sounds. 

 We practiced our handwriting, drew in our journals all the ways that we can be healthy.  Talked about spheres and cubes with our fun germs printables and danced for exercise.  It was so much fun!

Healthy Bodies

We had a great day talking all about how germs make us sick and how we can get rid of them to stay healthy.  We talked about washing hands, flushing the potty, coughing in our elbows, mopping the floor and putting leftover food in the fridge.  We read lots of books today and had so much fun looking at the pictures of the silly looking germs.  We learned the letter K today with karate kicks.  We each got a sticker for our shirts and talked about healthy body exercise.  The kids really loved making healthy "food" in our play kitchen.  They cooked and sorted all the food and dishes.  We also made 3D shapes out of paper (they have cute germ pictures on them, find them in the tot pack) and built with blocks (as 3D shape introduction).   It was a fantastic day. 

K is for Karate and Healthy Bodies

We had a great day in preschool today learning all about letter K.  We were able to do some one-on-one reading time working on the skills each child specifically needed.  We also played on Starfall.com, on the iPad with the teach me app and did the art project from the Amazing Action Alphabet for the letter K.  Today was an introduction day to 3D shapes.  We used the language: "flat shapes" and "block shapes".