Digging for Dinosaurs

Wow!  What a great day of school!  The kids loved playing in the indoor sandbox and digging for dinosaurs.  We read the "Magic Tree House" dinosaurs book while they dug away the sand and "found" dinosaur bones.  There was quite a bit of digging and building and dinosauring happening this morning.

 We used the hole punches to decorate our dancing letter D and cut out sandpaper to make dinosaur bodies in our journals. It was a great day of learning!

 This afternoon we worked diligently in our guided reading groups and on our Ready2Read work.  The kids are doing fantastic with their reading.  I'm very impressed with their skills.

 We read "The Kiss that Missed" and drew our favorite parts in our journals.  We included words to describe our pictures and every one of them did a great job at sounding out the word(s) they wanted to write and wrote the letters.  Great work!

We finished our unit about coins today.  Now they know the 4 main coins, a little about them and what they're worth.  It's more of an introductory lesson that will be reintroduced in Kindergarten math. We ended the day with some fun in the sandbox.  What a great day!

Snowy Dinosaurs

This morning we had a great time talking about snow.  We played with shaving cream and glue "snow" as well as powdered "snow".  We learned the letter F and never before has the letter F been so easy to teach (Thank You, Frozen!).  We're working diligently to sound out the letters and blend them into words. 

 One of the reading groups had a really fun time teaching their sock monkey all the things that good readers do.  It was so fun to watch them do this.  We also practiced tracing our names on snowflakes.  In math we continued working on graphing.  We did just a couple pages of practice on the SmartBoard before our time was up for the day.

This afternoon we were talking about the letter D and dinosaurs.  We started the day being paleontologists digging for dinosaurs in our mini sand boxes.  The kids really loved this activity. 

 We read a book about dinosaurs and used yellow markers to mark the words that we could read.  Then one group continued that strategy by marking the words in their mini readers.  We also read the page in our encyclopedia about dinosaurs.  In their encyclopedia you'll find a small paper glued into the dinosaur page.  It's a b and d reminder picture to help kids remember which is which.

We had a ton of fun with math today.  We're talking about 2d shapes and their characteristics.  Today we utilized a shape building toy I have to work on it.  I first pulled out the pieces to make a shape and asked them what shape I could make.  We talked about how we could know for sure what I was going to make (shape of the sides "curved or straight", how many sides, how many corners) and then I built it.  After the lesson I set them loose to make any of the 4 basic shapes on their own.  It was quite interesting to watch them figure out what pieces they need in order to complete the task.

We did a lot of great learning today. Don't forget that Wednesday is Polar Express day and kids are welcome to wear their pajamas and bring a teddy bear!

Dancing Dinosaurs in Tot School

Talk about oodles of fun!  We learned about the letter D by playing with dinosaurs in our indoor sandbox and dancing the day away!  Everyone loved digging and playing with the tot packs and puzzles. 

 We did a fun stamping activity with dinosaur outlines, made dinosaur sock puppets and even did an amount of yoga (that's dancing, right?).  We had so much fun!

Dinosaurs in Preschool!

We had so much fun learning all about dinosaurs!  To beat the winter cold we decided to purchase the sand for our sandbox in January and fill up a swimming pool with it in the living room.  It made for a whole lot of fun for about a week!  The sandbox was filled with dinosaur toys of all sorts as well as paintbrushes for digging.  We read "Dinosaurs Before Dark" and practiced making dinosaur noises all day. 

 We wrote/drew book reports about the story we read before moving on to talk about patterns, practicing the piano, working with puzzles and reading more books.  It was a great day!

January Tot Packs

Find the year long theme calendar {here} and follow along with us! This post gives details and pictures of all 5 January Toddler Packs. Be sure to scroll down to see all of them. 

Tot Packs 20-24
Tot packs are about 20 pages in length. They each have 2 pages of activity ideas, book suggestions, and links to the materials I use. You can certainly use all or part of the lesson plans.  The printable pages include songs, matching games, drawing games and other activities. Tot packs are designed to be a first introduction to math concepts, letters, shapes and colors. They are not meant to obtain mastery in any subject. Let them be a guide for educational play between you and your child.

January
{Download all 5 January Tot Packs}

20. Snowmen {Download}

 Printables in this pack:

Snowman Letter Review

Graphing Snowmen

Snowman Bowling

Build a Snowman

 Snowman Grid Game

Snowman Short Path Game

21. Moms {Download}
(Pictures Coming Soon)

Printables in this pack:

Writing the word “Mom”

Sorting Moms and Dads

Everyday Chores - Graphing Moms

Letter O

Shadow Matching Moms

Every Day Puzzles

Flowers for Mom

22. Manners II {Download}

Printables in this Pack:

Kid AB Patterns

Pre-Reading Book

Letter N

Shape Matching

Manners Songs

23. Nursery Rhymes {Download}

Printables in this Pack:

Size Sequencing

Hickory Dickory Dock - Interactive Clock

The Missing Sheep

Letter Review (M T A S B H C I L P F J O N)

This Little Piggy Sequencing

Patterning

Baa, Baa Purple Sheep

Nursery Rhymes

4 and 20 Blackbirds Baked in a Pie

Musical Hearts

24. Dancing Dinosaurs {Download}

Printables in this Pack:

Dinosaur Colors Pre-Reading Book

 Letter D

3 Piece Dinosaur Puzzles

 Hop Along the Dino Path

 Dinosaur Size Sequencing

Dinosaur Patterns

Dinosaurs 2/1/2012

Wow!  Life has really gotten away from me lately!  I apologize that I haven't kept up on blogging since January.  Yikes!  We certainly had a lot of fun in preschool in the last few weeks!  Here's what we've been up to.

We were studying dinosaurs with the letter D.  I love this photo of my dino reading kids!

 We also worked on spelling our names with these cute name puzzles with characters from the Dinosaur Train on them.  I got the materials for this activity from 1+1+1=1

 I love how T was reading this book during his independent reading time.  He was so excited!

 Our reading groups are a lot of fun on our new kid sized tables.  We've been able to start reading "Bob Books" since we've learned the key letters and it's a nice change of pace for us.

 What do you get when you give bottles of glue, toothpicks, craft sticks, googlie eyes, feathers, yarn and foam to a bunch of kids?   Dinosaurs of course!

 We ate lettuce and meat for snack time to be just like the dinosaurs.  This is the best dinosaur snack time face!  (Noise effects were encouraged :)

 D the dinosaur dances disco, so we had another dance party.  Good thing those girls know how to teach the boys!

 We continued working on the dino pack from 1+1+1=1 by matching up the correct number of pompoms as there were dinosaurs on each page.