Tot School - Fruits and Vegetables

Tot school this morning was so much fun!  We're really starting to get into the groove with this group of kids.  We really get rumbling and tumbling into all the good stuff as kids start to adjust to our group.  Truth be told - having a group of toddlers usually means there are kids who cry at drop off for a while.  The good news is that they hardly cry for very long. When there are so many awesome activities ready to dive into the fun starts right away.  Today we talked all about fruits and vegetables.  We talked about all the colors of all the fruits and vegetables.  We sorted them by color and explored their different textures.  Even if they didn't eat it (or want it) for snack time they all got a variety of fruits and vegetables on their plate.  My goal with kids is to give them the opportunity to see, touch, smell, and possibly even taste a bunch of different fruits and vegetables.  Then when they don't get eaten, they become wonderful paint brushes!

 We used broccoli for our paint brushes today, along with green paint.  The weather was so lovely we were able to play outside with all the different food toys.  We also pulled out the bubbles just for fun.  I read one of my favorite books "Tops and Bottoms" to a transitioning group of kids.  In tot school we often don't make it through a book.  I start to read to interested kids, they wander away and other kids come to listen, and when they all wander far enough to not hear I put the book down in a spot where they can come back to it and hopefully they do at some point. 

I was really happy with how today went in tot school.  Today was week 6 of 10 in this session and everyone is melding so well together.  I'm excited for what our future together holds!

Fruits

Preschool A had a fun morning learning all about fruit.  We sorted fruit by color, picked our favorites and added them to our journals.  We practiced our letter V and the funny lip vibration sound it makes.  We had fruit for snack time and many kids tried kiwi fruit for the first time.  Yum!

 We had a great time learning the numeral 4 and practicing counting the TouchPoints on the TouchMath app.  It's an easy way to visually and physically count representations to remember the numeral.  We also spent the last 15 minutes playing outside in the lovely weather, I love this time of year!

 This afternoon we started outside but it got too chilly and we came in to continue our work in comfort.  We read some of "Pippi Longstocking" and had fun conversations about all the silly things she does.  We drew and wrote about our favorite parts of the story in our journals.

 We also continued our work on our Constructing Numbers game.  It went home as homework - PLEASE play it at home AND RETURN it on WEDNESDAY (mud and worms Monday, so keep it a couple extra days to practice).  We'll add numbers 51-99 for kids who are ready for it on Wednesday.  We also worked on our guided reading groups and Ready2Read lessons.

Vegetables and Constructing Numbers

This morning we had a super fun time playing with the kitchen toys and talking all about vegetables.  We learned the letter V and made sure our sound was /v/ and not /vu/.  Try to practice isolating the sound when you teach letter sounds to kids, it will help them in their future reading.  We ate three different types of vegetables for snack time and talked about 3 servings of vegetables each day helps keep our bodies healthy.

 We also learned the numeral 3 today.  We had tons of fun playing with the TouchMath counting app.  A great one for basic recognition of numerals up to 9.  We played with the texture numeral cards and got to jump on the floor numeral mats.  You can find a lot of fun TouchMath ideas here.

This afternoon in preschool B we continued working on Constructing Numbers.  We're using unifix cubes to build the numbers up to 50.  Our focus is on understanding the tens and the units (ones) position in the number.  It's helping us be able to say the numeral if we don't know it (build it, count it) and it's helping us sort out our teens issues.  It seems that the teen numbers are always the hardest to master, they don't follow any of the rules of the higher numbers (like stating the tens before the units).

 We also worked on our guided reading lessons with baggy books and Ready2Read.  I'm loving the "Now I'm Reading" sets that we are using right now to help us solidify sounding out short vowel words.  We're also working in level 2 and B to practice utilizing other strategies like "beginning sound" and "picture clues" to help us figure out what the word says.

Preschool Fruit Theme

What a fantastic day of school!  We've been learning so much lately in school.  Our theme today was "Fruit" (makes sense with the theme "Vegetables" on Tuesday).  We started with puzzles, a repeated activity we'll do for the rest of the year.  We read a few books about fruit including "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad" a fantastic book that you'll find a post about (and a giveaway!) later today. We continued with our guided reading lesson working on level A pre-reader texts.  Wonder why we're working on these texts since we've been using decodable texts all year?  Check out V is for Vegetable for more clarity. 

Another super fun aspect of our day today was that on our property we have about 10 different fruit trees and plants.  We were able to go on a nature walk just in our little area and talk about each of the different plants.  We searched for flowers that were starting to pop out and talked about if we don't bother them the bees will pollinate the flowers and fruits will grow.  We talked about the different shapes and colors of the different leaves and flowers. 

After returning inside we talked about numeral 4.  There is a great little series of books I read from Scholastic called "Number Stories".  There is a number chant at the end of each book and the kids love it!  They get to clap and stomp and jump and turn all for the number of the day.  It's so much fun.  Check out our full lesson plans for the Preschool Fruit Theme here. 

Fruits and Vegetables

Fruits and Vegetables was a great theme to do outside.  It seems Colorado weather is letting us go outside about every other week now.  Hopefully we'll be outside all of May!  We played in the sandbox, playhouse and with all the other outside toys at first.  It was rather hard to attract anyone to any of my fruit and vegetable activities, they were all having such fun!  At snack time (which lasted longer than 30 minutes, by the way) we sampled a variety of vegetables and fruits.  We started with the vegetables.  Everyone got one of something (snap peas, broccoli, carrots, etc.) and then we'd talk about the color, taste and texture.  Next we'd compare it to what we ate last.  After the vegetables were gone I pulled out the fruits and we repeated the exercise comparing fruits to vegetables and fruits to fruits.  It was so much fun!

One of our favorite activities was painting with broccoli.  It makes such a fantastic little paintbrush!  We also played with the kitchen quite a bit, making all sorts of fruit and vegetable concoctions.  Ask your toddler if they remember how to make a V in sign language.  V is for vegetables!  

V is for Vegetables

Learning about letter V is so much fun!  It makes our lips tickle to make the sound!  We started off our day working on puzzles, a fantastic tool to work on visual perception, fine-motor skills, thinking, reasoning and logic.  We're attempting to make the jump from 12 piece puzzles to 24 piece puzzles.  The 12 piece ones are still a challenge to a few of us so we'll keep working on those.  We also took the time today to let the preschoolers update the calendar to represent April (a little late I know).  It was a great counting and number placement activity for us.

Today we also started work on pre-reading books.  Pre-Reading skills are the skills that a person needs before they can become a reader.  Many of these skills are learned through natural introduction from the adults and “big kids” in a child’s life.  We have started more formal guided reading lessons using the Scholastic GRL A book set.  This set is helpful because there are multiple copies of each book so everyone can have their own to read.   There are a few goals I have in mind with these books:

·        Direction: Text goes from left to right.  We read books from left to right.
·        Concepts of print: How we handle books is a skill.  Can you hold it right side up?  Can you turn the pages the correct direction and only one page at a time?  Can you find the text on the page?  Do you know that the words tell the story?
·        Patterns: Literature often has rhythm and patterns in it.  These pre-readers are set up with repetitive text and a predictable picture-clue to the new vocabulary on each page.
·        Memorization: In order to be successful readers we have to memorize certain things like letter names and sounds.  The first step to this is memorizing the repetitive text.
·        Acting like a Reader: Reading is fun when we are successful.  It can also be really frustrating if we aren't being successful.  By memorizing the text and acting like a reader before being able to actually read the words we can be successful with just the basic skills.  Please don’t correct a child if they say the words differently than the text; praise them for their story telling and read the book again and again to them and they’ll pick up the memorization on their own.
·       Utilize our reading strategy known as "Get Your Mouth Ready".  While pointing at the words we get our mouth ready to say the beginning sound of the word.  Even if we can't yet successfully decode the word we can remember the rhythm and rhyme and be prompted by the beginning sound.

Find a set of free printable pre-reading books here.
Based on our theme we also read tons of books about vegetables, including our favorite "Tops and Bottoms".  It's a fantastic book about the parts of each plant that are considered food.  Be sure to check out the blog for upcoming posts for a book giveaway of this book and one other!

Thursday Tot School - Fruits and Vegetables

What a great week of learning!  Thursday Tot School enjoyed playing and learning with fruits and vegetables.  I love having a few seed catalogs on hand because you can get them for free and they are full of pictures for kids to utilize for all sorts of activities.  Today we were cutting out pictures to make a place mat of fruits and vegetables. Of course, I use the phrase "cutting out" very loosely :)

 We're learning all about how to hold scissors and make a cut.  There isn't any intentional cutting yet, just snipping around the edges.  Practice this at home by giving your child junk mail and pages of magazines and some child safe scissors and let them cut however they like.  With lots of practice they'll figure out the most efficient way of cutting.

 We're working on numerals this month and every once in a while we get to play on the numbers portion of Starfall.com (subscription site only).

 They love playing with the SMARTBoard.

 We also had out all the fruits, vegetables and kitchen toys today.  There was a lot of cooking, baking, and "cutting" going on.

 I had to sneak in this fun picture.  CJ has been working on ABCmouse.com during tot school.  He's having fun with his computer time and it's reinforcing his learning.

 This week we focused on the letter V for Vegetables.

 Snack time was a lot of fun with a variety of fruits and vegetables to try.

 Coloring our place mats.

 Gluing our place mats.

 We had a lot of fun this week!

For the next two weeks we'll be switching our curriculum.  Due to the weather we'll spend the first week talking about trees and plants and the second week talking about mud and worms.  Hopefully by the time mud and worms rolls around it will be warm enough to head outside again to make some mud pies. 

Fruit - Preschool Wednesday

Today we got to talk about Fruit.  And, what better way than to start with fruity smelling play-dough?

 Counting the "snakes" he made.

 Here we were practicing the /v/ sound while pretending to push vacuums :)

 Our shared reading on the SMARTBoard today, and now that I think of it, I forgot to send home the V book.  Oops.  This beginning reader is one from the set of Amazing Action Alphabet books.  I love how the books build upon each other and don't introduce any advanced phonics or sight words like so many of the other beginning reader books.

 We sorted the fruit and vegetable cards today according to fruits and vegetables.

 Then everyone had to pick the picture of their favorite fruit and tell us what it is called.

 For snack time we enjoyed a variety of different fruits.

 Here is art before it was handed out.  A few different essential oils, water with food coloring to match and some eye droppers with coffee filters.

 They really enjoyed making their fruity smelling art, and it is great fine motor development.

 Today's number is 4!  Remember to keep working on your number homework books at home each day.  We enjoyed playing with the TouchMath Textured Numerals today.

 We've also started learning our songs for the preschool program at the end of May.  They did great and it was only the first time I'd introduced the songs to them today.

 In afternoon preschool we've taken on a large challenge, representing numbers using manipulatives.  It sounds all vague and relatively easy, but any number more than 9 enters new territory for these preschoolers: place value. We started the day doing some free explore of quantity blocks.

 Then we pulled out all the rods and cubes.  We needed to find out how many cubes equaled one rod.  (The answer was 10).

 We talked about if we wanted to represent large numbers we'd have a mess of cubes and counting the rods as 10 would help us.  Then we needed to represent a number that wasn't a multiple of 10. Counting the rod as 10 and then adding on, "11, 12, 13" is a HUGE leap.  Up till now we've counted by 10's (10, 20, 30, etc.) and now I'm asking them to count by 10's and then count by 1's to add all the cubes.

 I failed to rotate this picture and blogger won't let me, but the next step in representing numbers with manipulatives is being able to identify what the numeral represents.  The number 13 has a 1 to represent 1 rod of 10 and a 3 to represent 3 cubes.  We made great learning strides today, but this concept is still very murky in these young minds.  We'll keep working on it though.

 Next, they were each given a set of cards.  Each set contained the numerals 1-20 and picture images of base 10 blocks for each number.  They were instructed to match the numeral with its correct picture and then put the numbers in order.  It was interesting how all 3 of them went about this project in completely different ways.
There was putting the numerals in order to start with...

 Spreading all the cards on the floor and picking them at random to set on the table in pairs...

 And there was the strategy of hold them all in a pile and look through them until matches were found.
 In the end they were all successful with plenty of help along the way.  What I learned today is that even though they can count well and identify numbers well it is challenging for each of them to identify numbers out of order and they don't have a frame of reference for what the numbers represent in quantity. So, that's what we'll be working on.

 We continued our R-Controlled vowels with the book "Surfer Girl" at the end of the day. Keep up all the hard work at home, we're learning lots here at school and your reinforcement at home helps us learn even more!