Preschool 3-7-16

During the month of March we have 4 extra preschool days, one each week.  This helps us make up for time lost due to snow days.  I am so excited for the little extra push we'll get to achieve our next goals and push a little harder.  We spent the majority of our time working on our reading today.  After each child completed their lesson for the day they were able to take advantage of the library on their own for the first time.  It was so much fun to teach them how to look through a certain shelf of books, pick one that looks interesting, take it to the sofa to read or look through, and then return to the bookshelf in the correct spot to pick another book.  There was so much giggling as kids found books that were fun and entertaining to them. They talked among each other asking about words and characters in the stories they had picked up.  I hope to continue this activity each day after reading lessons to ensure every minute is used wisely and instill a love of books.  I then read to the kids "Rhyming Dust Bunnies".  Most kids have a copy at home from the last school year so they know the story well. If you haven't seen it before I HIGHLY recommend it.  It helps us work on our rhyming and is super silly.  We took a leap off of our read aloud and looked for very silly writing in our journals afterwards.  The kids were super excited to draw dust bunnies and write funny words.  They were funny to the 4 and 5 year olds and I'm certain adults wouldn't quite get the humor.  We had one student write "bode bode bode" (body, body, body) and she thought it was the most hilarious thing on the planet.  Another one had a full conversation with "Bob" (a dust bunny) and his writing represented the things Bob replied to him.  It was super fun and silly and encouraged much more writing than I see when I say "Write about whatever you'd like".

We're still working on tens and units so today I pulled out "Place Value Safari".  It's a board game that we aren't actually ready for the real rules to, but with a little modification we had fun and practiced trading in 10 units for a stick of ten.  We simply rolled a d6, took that many units, placed them on our 100 frame, and if we had reached a line of 10 units with what we rolled we exchanged 10 units for a stick of ten.  Super simple and could be easily replicated at home.  Though simple, the kids were fully engaged and we even went over our scheduled time together before I noticed that I had to go let the moms in.