Manners

What a fantastic day of learning!  We continued working with the letter M today and had a fantastic group reading lesson with the M book on the SmartBoard.  We each took turns reading the pages of the book and demonstrating the skills that good readers do.

 1. Good Readers Look at the Letters

2. Good Readers Point to the Letters

 3. Good Readers Say the Letter Sounds

4. Good Readers Listen to the Sounds They Made

 Keep practicing using all of those skills when you read your beginning reader M book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We also had a fantastic conversation with a few books and posters guiding our discussion about manners.  We talked about how different actions make us feel (hitting=sad, sharing=happy, etc.).  The kids LOVED their Popsicle stick happy and sad faces and used them to show me how characters in books were feeling and how they would feel if a particular thing happened to them.  We had our first handwriting lesson today about how to hold a pencil.  We practiced the chant from the back of their name writing page to pinch the pencil and put it into place.  PLEASE help your child hold their writing tools in the correct tripod grip.  If you need me to show it to you please ask!  We had so much fun with our math lesson today.  It involved M&M's and captured their interest quickly.  We talked about what "the same" is.  I had one plate and I gave one to EMan.  Do we have the same number?  Etc. After we all had plates we got mini M&M's (3 each) and talked about how we had the same amount.  Color is hard to separate at this age for this concept.  I could see their little brains thinking, "I have green, she had brown, we do not have the same."  We worked through it a bit and understand that it's just an introduction that we'll revisit for understanding later.  One activity we did was hold up 2 (or 1 or 3) fingers on each hand and touched them to each other.  If they all had one to touch they were the same.  If any fingers were left wiggling they weren't the same.

 Preschool B also worked on handwriting today for the first time.  It took unexpectedly much longer than I had anticipated.  We discussed the proper way to hold a pencil and the different lines of the writing grid.  Remember that to aid kids in writing their writing paper has a top line (sky line), a bottom line (grass line), and a middle dotted line (branch line).  This helps us learn to size the different parts of the letters correctly.  Today we only practiced writing letter M.  We did both capital M and lowercase m.  If you work on handwriting at home (on a whiteboard or on paper) please encourage writing the letter m for the next week.

We also worked on the skills that good readers do.  We talked about how we make the sounds of the letters and if we blend the letter sounds together our ears can hear the word we're reading.  We'll be going at a slower pace with learning the alphabet and reading than I had originally intended.  Please look for an email soon with the new calendar and an explanation of details.  We need to make sure we have these basics down solid before we move on!  We had such a blast with math today.  Similar to the morning class we had mini chocolate chips (white/dairy free chocolate of course) and talked about "More" and "Less".  Zero is an interesting part of our conversation as it seemed difficult to understand more and less in the terms of has something and has nothing.  Use the vocabulary "More", "Less", and "Equal" for the next couple weeks around the house to help kids fully grasp this concept.

Have a great Labor Day Monday!  I look forward to seeing everyone again next Wednesday!