The Importance of a Finger Space

Today in preschool we started work on our own book that mimics a book called "This is my Halloween".  It is an easy reader and we're utilizing the pattern to write similar books with words and pictures that match our own personal Halloween stories and costumes.  After reading our mentor text a few times we were ready to get started.  A mentor text is a book that does something that we want to try and do in our own writing.  "This is my ..." is the repeating phrase we'll be using within our own books about our costumes, family and traditions.  As we were working a teachable moment arose when I noticed so many books looked like this: ThisismyHalloween.  Insert a lesson about the importance of a finger space.  Here is the idea: between every word there is a space so we know the old word is over and a new one will begin.  In the beginning writing stages using a finger space, actually putting your finger down after a word and starting your new word on the other side of your finger, the space becomes a concrete part of the writing process.  Try to encourage the use of the finger space if your kids are doing any writing at home (which I highly encourage!). 

 Our work on our decodable and leveled reading books continued today with great success.  There may have even been M&M's involved.  Boy those little mini M&M's encourage kids to try sounding words out immediately instead of staring off into space.  With the little motivation I was thrilled to see the fantastic progress that the whole group is making.  Keep it up!  In fact, the progress was so awesome that I'm going to ditch the rest of the alphabet review entirely.  Expect a new calendar with updated information soon!  We finished our short unit on graphing today with a little cut and glue project and then had a blast with an introduction to making thumbprint Halloween creatures.  We'll be using thumbprint creatures for the next 3 days in our build up to Halloween.  Happy learning everyone!

Persistent Learners

Today in preschool we talked about being persistent A LOT.  We jumped right in to work on sorting sight words with do-a-dot markers and then moved to cutting and gluing to make a 15 chart.

 There was much conversation about how the 15 chart was difficult.  It was tricky figuring out what number goes where and which direction to place the number. Often times the first time you do something it isn't easy but with practice it gets easier.  As long as we are PERSISTENT and KEEP TRYING we are GROWING OUR BRAINS!  Isn't that exciting?

 During our writing time today we jumped back into forming clock letters.  We only talked about the letter O today but we did make a capital (mommy) and a lowercase (baby) attempt.  Imagine a clock.  When we write circle shaped letters (imagine the letter "o") we start at the 2 o'clock and go counterclockwise around the clock and back to the 2.  We do the same for letters like "a" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, then straight down), "d" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, straight up to the top and straight down to the bottom).  Clock letters include: a, c, d, f, g, o, s, q.  These letters all start at the "2 o'clock" (the f starts at the 2 on the top clock).  This is an important habit to encourage at home.

 The kids were thrilled when I told them they would get to watch a movie.  Shouts of "Iron Man" and "Blues Clues" were offered up as suggestions.  Instead, we watched Steve.  He's the man in the Math-U-See curriculum videos.  We watched about 3 minutes of his segment about "Decimal Street".  Then we played the decimal street tornado game.  Each child got a page with a drawn decimal street and some unit and tens blocks.  We would all make tornado noises and mix up all the blocks.  Then when the tornado ended we had to put the units back in the units house and the tens back in the tens house.

After playing the tornado game the kids were let in on a little secret.  When we write the quantity of blocks in each house it writes the same number as there are blocks!  I explained it in more appropriate 4 year old language and we built the numbers 1-12 on the white board as we were talking through the concept.

These kiddos certainly worked hard as persistent learners today.  Great work everyone!

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!

Karate, Quilts and Dr. Seuss

This morning in preschool we learned about the letter K.  We talked all about karate and keeping our bodies healthy.  We read a book called "The Great Race" about some barnyard animals that race each other.  It's super cute!  We also worked on blending our letter sounds to make words.

 We're still working on our b's and d's and had a fun time cutting out our K the Kangaroos.  We played with balls for math today as we talked about circles being flat and spheres being round like a ball.

 This afternoon we continued the Dr. Seuss celebration with today being his actual 111th birthday.  We read The Cat in the Hat and drew and wrote about our favorite parts.  We worked on our math matching game and in our Ready2Read units.

 We also talked about quilts and made a class quilt that is now hanging on the wall.  Just like the morning class we read "The Great Race" and there are TONS of words that your 4 year old should be able to read by themselves in this book.  It's a great companion reading book, so pull it out of their binder and practice reading together!

Review Day 1-14-2015

We had so much fun this morning in Preschool A.  We continued practice on our name writing pages and they are looking so fantastic!  Once we had practiced our names a few times we also worked in the Amazing Action Alphabet Handwriting 1 book and did a trace and cut assessment page.  We had tons of fun working on our letter N book at the SmartBoard and learning that an exclamation point means that the sentence is yelled (I apologize in advance for them yelling "NO!" at the end of each page, I was trying to make a point :) ). 

 We also continued our work on ABAB patterns.  Our tool of choice today was colored chips.  We made long snakes in our patterns and then mixed them up and did it again.  We utilized VirtualPiano.net to practice the piano on the SmartBoard because it gave me the ability to circle sets of 2 black keys and 3 black keys and write on the page "A" and "B" above certain notes to practice making musical patterns.

 This afternoon we worked hard in our Ready2Read program.  What you can't tell from the pictures is that my house, and the children, were all covered in glitter by the end of reading.  Glitter certainly makes learning sight words that much more fun!  Four kids passed off their units and moved on to more sight words and word families.  They really like when the whole class cheers for them, it's so cute.  Writing today was tons of fun.  I read "Alice the Fairy" by David Shannon aloud to the class.  Then we did a 5 finger retell as a group.  We each shared our favorite part of the story and then we went to work drawing and writing about that part in the book.

 The kids really enjoyed math today because it involved playdough.  We made the playdough together and then worked on making our 3D shapes with it.  Today was the last day of 3D shapes since we'll be working on coins for the rest of the month.  Please point out spheres, cubes, pyramids, cones and cylinders to your kids as often as possible.  This is important vocabulary.

What a great day of learning!  Enjoy Monday off for MLK Day!  See everyone Wednesday!

Manners

What a fantastic day of learning!  We continued working with the letter M today and had a fantastic group reading lesson with the M book on the SmartBoard.  We each took turns reading the pages of the book and demonstrating the skills that good readers do.

 1. Good Readers Look at the Letters

2. Good Readers Point to the Letters

 3. Good Readers Say the Letter Sounds

4. Good Readers Listen to the Sounds They Made

 Keep practicing using all of those skills when you read your beginning reader M book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We also had a fantastic conversation with a few books and posters guiding our discussion about manners.  We talked about how different actions make us feel (hitting=sad, sharing=happy, etc.).  The kids LOVED their Popsicle stick happy and sad faces and used them to show me how characters in books were feeling and how they would feel if a particular thing happened to them.  We had our first handwriting lesson today about how to hold a pencil.  We practiced the chant from the back of their name writing page to pinch the pencil and put it into place.  PLEASE help your child hold their writing tools in the correct tripod grip.  If you need me to show it to you please ask!  We had so much fun with our math lesson today.  It involved M&M's and captured their interest quickly.  We talked about what "the same" is.  I had one plate and I gave one to EMan.  Do we have the same number?  Etc. After we all had plates we got mini M&M's (3 each) and talked about how we had the same amount.  Color is hard to separate at this age for this concept.  I could see their little brains thinking, "I have green, she had brown, we do not have the same."  We worked through it a bit and understand that it's just an introduction that we'll revisit for understanding later.  One activity we did was hold up 2 (or 1 or 3) fingers on each hand and touched them to each other.  If they all had one to touch they were the same.  If any fingers were left wiggling they weren't the same.

 Preschool B also worked on handwriting today for the first time.  It took unexpectedly much longer than I had anticipated.  We discussed the proper way to hold a pencil and the different lines of the writing grid.  Remember that to aid kids in writing their writing paper has a top line (sky line), a bottom line (grass line), and a middle dotted line (branch line).  This helps us learn to size the different parts of the letters correctly.  Today we only practiced writing letter M.  We did both capital M and lowercase m.  If you work on handwriting at home (on a whiteboard or on paper) please encourage writing the letter m for the next week.

We also worked on the skills that good readers do.  We talked about how we make the sounds of the letters and if we blend the letter sounds together our ears can hear the word we're reading.  We'll be going at a slower pace with learning the alphabet and reading than I had originally intended.  Please look for an email soon with the new calendar and an explanation of details.  We need to make sure we have these basics down solid before we move on!  We had such a blast with math today.  Similar to the morning class we had mini chocolate chips (white/dairy free chocolate of course) and talked about "More" and "Less".  Zero is an interesting part of our conversation as it seemed difficult to understand more and less in the terms of has something and has nothing.  Use the vocabulary "More", "Less", and "Equal" for the next couple weeks around the house to help kids fully grasp this concept.

Have a great Labor Day Monday!  I look forward to seeing everyone again next Wednesday!

Wednesday Preschool

Wednesday preschool was a review day for letters and patterns.  It was such a nice day that we played outside for quite a bit. 

 It was fun to watch how they interacted with each other and reflect upon how much they've grown as friends throughout the year.

 Back inside we practiced our letters and reading books we've already been introduced to.

 I'm impressed with how well they're sounding out words and remembering to do what good readers do.

 Mid book these boys decided to make carpet snow angels :)

Practicing reading our beginning reader books.

 While we had small group reading time the group not working with me got to play on the Starfall.com app on the iPad.

 Preschool B worked on short U and reading "'ck" as a single sound.  We did some vowel sorting and next week we'll move on to the first introduction of vowel teams in a_e teams.  Wish us luck!

 PreB kids got their Starfall Reading Award for completing the first 5 books in the series. We practiced writing the titles of the books and using a finger to make an appropriate sized space between words.

 We had a bunch of pictures with differing medial vowel sounds.  The kids cut out the pictures and then organized them according to the vowel sound they heard in the middle of the word.

 ... and then had to sort them according to vowel sound. This is actually fairly tricky - notice CJ's head to the table frustration :P

Preschool - Moms

I don't often show pictures of us working on our name cards because I feel I need to protect the kids by blocking out their names and that's more work than I want to do every week. We do, however, do this activity often and it is very obvious how many families encourage their child to do their name tracing at home.  PLEASE do it weekly at a minimum and daily if you can.  Being able to write their own name is a goal for the end of preschool and I need your help at home to make it happen.

 We had a little "Listen and Move" break right away since we were a bit antsy.

 We learned how to spell mom and that good readers make the sounds of the letters they see written in words.  Each child got 3 circle stickers, each with one letter of the word "mom" on it.  We put the stickers on our fingers and tap our fingers to our thumbs.  When the letter is touched by our thumb our mouth has to make the sound that the letter represents. We say the sounds faster and faster until we know what the word says.

 Practicing our letter sounds.

 We took a little movement break and did a Sun Salutation (Yoga - Track 1 on Dance for the Sun).  I love this track because the lyrics sing the movement you should be doing, so with a very little yoga information you can be successful.

 Here are the boys working on reading their Letter O book about all the jobs moms do.

 We had our first lesson on patterns with some unifix cubes today.  Each child took home 20 blocks (theirs to keep at home) please help them make an AB pattern with their blocks EVERY DAY for the next 2 weeks.  You can also encourage them to make different designs and explore what they can do with the blocks.

 We ended the day working on the 2, 3, 2, 3 pattern of black keys on the piano.  We play the black keys all the way up the keyboard saying the number of keys we're playing.

 Preschool B is working on short vowels for the next few weeks.  Our focus for today was short e.

 We also spent a lot of time reading from our encyclopedias and finding all the vowels in every word.

 Coloring all of the vowels.

 We were reading about light and the different colors we can see with light in one of the encyclopedias and the kids decided that they wanted to paint and mix the paint to make new colors for art time.  So we did.

 We played with the Touch Math 3D Numerals for the first time today as we tried to match up the correct number of dots onto each numeral.

 I have to say that I've been quite leery of paint and messy projects lately since my house has been so clean (due to an awesome barter with an awesome mom).  Perhaps EMan is the true culprit in my leeriness since he had to have a mini bath in the kitchen sink before we could move onto math in preschool B...