Preschool Day 1

What a fantastic first day of preschool B 2015!  We hit the ground running talking about who we are from our inquiry block.  We shared our favorite colors and started a list of words to describe ourselves.  So far we have "Learners" and "Readers" on the list.  A great start!  We spent some time talking about expectations after we had our "Who We Are" list started.  We talked about how expectations are rules and we shared ideas about why they are important.  We came up with the following reasons for having expectations: *So we can learn *So we can stay safe *So we can all be happy.  What a great list.  Next came our class expectations or rules.  We decided on the following: *Treat things nicely *Treat people nicely.  Using this language we were able to go throughout our day discussing how to treat things and people nicely within the task we were set out to do.  

The first task at hand was learning about centers.  We've never really done "Centers" before in preschool.  I've always had activities for kids to do as I work with small reading groups.  This year I'm making them into more formal centers where we set a timer and rotate from activity to activity.  They did great at picking up the routine.  We went fishing for letters and sang the song about their name and sound when we caught a letter.  We played puzzles and we worked in small reading groups.

 We jumped right into what good readers do (use their eyes to look at letters, point at letters, say the letter sounds, and listen to letters).  We are working on reading books, blending letters into words, and combining sight words and simple phonics within stories.  After our reading and centers time we did a "Jumping Contest" where I play a song and the kids can jump around the room without touching or talking and get their wiggles out. The sofa turned out to be a great centerpiece for a "jumping race track" around the room and when the song was done they were all lined up!

 Next we moved into writing.  We talked about the way to hold a pencil, that we don't turn pages since we only work on one page per day, we draw pictures on the top empty space and letters/words on the lines below.  We also started talking about the way to form letters.  We talked about what lines are on writing paper (sky line, airplane line, baseline, worm line).  We talked about how letters start at the #2 position on the clock and work their way around (not all of them, but we worked on letter a today).  Then we drew and wrote.  It is always so fun to see from the first day of school to the last week of school how much they grow during this 4 year old year.  I love it!

At the end of the day we learned how to play "Staircases".  It's a number sense game that I love.  We roll the dice and then make a step with that many blocks.  We keep rolling the dice until we have steps 1-6 to make a staircase.  If the roll is a number we already have we simply roll again.

With all these great activities the kids went home already reading and playing math games.  Try to read and play at home so we can keep the momentum going and build upon these concepts on Thursday.  Happy learning!