Preschool 3/25

It was a surprise to have snow this morning!  What a fun way to talk about weather.  I had planned on going out in the rain but since it was awful cold snow instead we stayed inside.  We talked about the different types of weather and how it changes from day to day.  We talked about how weather changes with the moving air which can be hot or cold.  We practiced our letter W beginning reader and drew pictures of our favorite weather.  We even started exploring the idea of writing words to match our pictures in our journals.  We learned about quarters today to finish out our unit about money and had a great time practicing our songs in music. 

This afternoon we started off with puzzles and worked through a few last Ready2Read pages and our guided reading groups.  Many of the kids are ready to start a new unit on Monday.  Yay!  We're currently reading the "Now I'm Reading" series of books that utilize short vowel words so we can be successful in reading.  We also continued our discussion of place value and counted to 100.  I had each child write their numbers as high as they could to assess where any misconceptions were. 

Animal Friends and Reading

This morning was so much fun playing with our Animal Friends theme!  We read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" which is a perfect text to read the word "at".  We also read "Big Red Barn" and found all of the a's.  We had tons of fun coloring our A watches from the Moffatt Girls, playing on Starfall.com and working on our Amazing Action Alphabet activity page and handwriting page.

In math we had oodles of fun learning about MORE and LESS.  We watched a few short clips of Sesame Street characters explaining the concept and then got to work on our game.  This is a great activity to encourage identifying more and less.  If you don't have flip chips you can easily spray paint one side of a poker chip and achieve the same affect.

On Monday we had a monumental reading lesson in our morning class.  Today's monumental reading lesson was in the afternoon class.  The morning class will get this lesson in about 3 weeks, though it'll be a year long lesson.  It was such an awesome lesson that I have no pictures.  But I do have a video to walk you through it.  The video is 9 minutes in length but shows you the key parts of our reading lesson.  Please watch it to know how to support your reader at home or, if you are a teacher, watch to see the strategy I teach in my classroom.  (The video was too large and had to be split into two sections, find both below.)

In math we learned the rules to the game Compare. This game is identical to the card game "War" but sounds much nicer to call it "Compare".  Using a set of 20 cards each with a quantity of stickers 1-10 (done twice to make twenty cards) we split the deck evenly.  Each player turns over their top card at the same time and the person with more stickers gets to take both cards.  Continue play until your deck is gone.  Then pick up the cards you "won" and repeat.  This is a fantastic game to be playing at home!

Preschool B enjoyed drawing and writing with colored pencils today and we had a fantastic time doing the "Freeze Dance" during music.  It was a great week of learning!

Beginning Reader Mini Books Giveaway!

We've been working the past few weeks on our pre-reading books.  It's an important stage of reading development to be able to memorize text patterns and learn the skills that pre-reading texts provide practice in.  Be sure to check out my post about pre-reading books to familiarize yourself with the concept and skills we can be working on. 

Throughout the year we've been working on our repertoire of decodable texts.  I strongly believe that we can teach young children the alphabet in a manner where it is usable to them immediately, rather than just learning the names and sounds of symbols that don't have a purpose.  Each week as we focus on a new letter we add it to the letters we already know and work on sounding-out or decoding words with those letters.    

A decodable text in preschool is a text that utilizes only short vowels and single consonant sounds (think of CVC or consonant-vowel-consonant words like "cat").  We don't try to tackle tough phonics like digraphs (think of "th" or "sh") or soft sounds (think of "g" in giraffe).  Reading is a skill that requires a lot of practice and it's easier to practice something you are being successful at.  By the 3rd week of preschool we know the letters M, T and A and can decode or sound-out the words "at" and "am" and "mat".  That is literally success right out the gate!

I have been partnering with Esther from The Amazing Action Alphabet since I started teaching preschool.  The products she provides are excellent and follow this same philosophy that we can teach our young learners with great success.  She has a set of Beginning Reader Mini Books that are just perfect for our young readers.  The first page covers some of the basics of reading which helps every teacher or mom that has never taught reading before be successful. Then each 8.5 x 11 page has a book, intended to be copied, cut and stapled together.  Each book builds upon the previous ones as we learn to blend sounds together to read words.  The pictures are black and white and perfect for coloring.  Since they are paper books I LOVE having the kids circle any sight words they come across (I think there are a total of 6 sight words they learn to memorize).

Even if you don't win the books you can still get a great deal! I just heard back from Esther at Amazing Action Alphabet and she wants to offer a 20% discount code to readers of Little Adventures Preschool.  Just enter 11131971 at checkout! 

I  love how the second page of each book has a word list.  In the beginning of our reading lesson we write the words from the word list one at a time on the white board and practice sounding them out.  We draw pictures where it's helpful and we act things out (like "zip") to practice the words.  Then we head to the reading table where I have a big copy of the book.  I simply copied each little page to fit on a 8.5x11 by itself and put it in sheet protectors.  That way we have a giant shared reading version of the book to reference while each child has their own child size version in front of them.  We do a picture walk through the book and talk about what the pictures are showing us about the story.  Then we take turns reading pages through the story.  It works great and the kids are being successful!

I know that each of you would love to be successful in teaching reading in your home or school, right? Well, now is your chance!  Check out the Rafflecopter below and enter to win one of two copies of the Beginning Reader Mini Books from the Amazing Action Alphabet!  And don't forget to grab your discounted materials with coupon code 11131971 at checkout!  All of her products are simply amazing!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Zoo Animals - Day 1

We had a fantastic day of school learning all about the letter Z and Zoo animals.  We read books of all sorts.  Our favorite is Dear Zoo.  If you haven't seen it you should check it out.  We had a lot of fun with our reading lesson today using the letter Z book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  Watch the blog for a giveaway of these decodable readers soon!

 We also did Z art, learned numeral 8 and played with all sorts of zoo animals just like we were zoo keepers.  It was a great day.