Caterpillars and Insects

What a fantastic day of school!  We loved talking all about caterpillars today.  We read the letter C book and learned about the stages of a caterpillars life.  We even got to see a live caterpillar thanks to Lil'S bringing in her pet!  We were just like C the Caterpillar in art today.  We cut leaves!  This class needs A LOT of cutting practice and this would be a great activity to do at home this week while it is still warm.  Just head outside with a pair of kid safe scissors and let them cut all the leaves into confetti.  We also learned more about rhyming words today as we came up with rhymes for "at" and "am".  During math today we went outside and practiced "near" and "far".  The kids ran "near Miss Amanda" and "far from Miss Amanda".  They ran back and forth over and over until they were completely exhausted!

 In the afternoon we talked about the letter I and did a shared reading of "The Big Bug Dug".  It had many letters in it that we haven't talked about yet but most words are phonetic and we were able to read the majority of the book with help on a few advanced sight words.  We practiced reading in our reading groups and played the "i Word Machine" on Starfall.com.

 We continued working on graphing today in math.  Today we colored in different graphs.  We also had oodles of fun with the do-a-dot markers and insect stickers during art time!

Helpful Kids and Caterpillars

We had such a great time in preschool yesterday morning.  We spent the morning reading "The Little Red Hen" and making bread together.  Everyone got to put an ingredient in the mixer...

 Then they all rolled their own dough, put it in their pan and I put it in the oven.  

 It cooked while we continued our lesson about being Bucket Fillers and helpful kids.  We played with the kitchen toys after decorating our buckets and ended the day with a taste of yummy bread!

Afternoon preschool has really taken off with their reading!  I'm so glad that we have arrived at a place where kids can be actively working and playing while we do all our different reading groups.  We read Amazing Action Alphabet mini books, Bob Books and our Encyclopedias. 

 We've mastered the game "Guess My Secret Rule" and are ready to move on in math a bit earlier than expected, yay!  We had a great time reading and drawing about the life cycle of a caterpillar. 

Preschool Pumpkins

Pumpkins day in preschool really is a lot of fun.  We get to explore so many different aspects of pumpkins.  We colored on pumpkins with washable markers and used washcloths to wipe them off and color them again. 

We practiced the letters we've already learned with our pumpkin spinner.  We circle the word "the" in our song Five Little Pumpkins and we played with squishy sensory bags.  For all of our awesome lesson plans and printables see our Pumpkins Preschool Pack.  

 Every child got a copy of the book "Pumpkin Town" as their first book of the year.  I love getting every child a copy of a book that we can read together.  This gives them the responsibility to turn the pages appropriately and stay along with the group.  Directionality, one page at a time, and matching the pictures to the one in my copy of the book were what we were working. As we get a little better at reading we'll also start choral reading.

 I love our science time on Pumpkin Day.  We measure, weigh, count seeds, and talk about sink and float.

 We're starting to play "Guess My Secret Rule" now.  We'll be playing it for the next few weeks. Remember Sesame Street's "One of these things is not like the other..." segment?  This is exactly the same.  We have 4 items, 3 of those items have a matching characteristic and the last one doesn't match.  We talk about which one doesn't match and WHY.  As an introduction today I used pumpkins and we had characteristics such as color, size, face/no-face.  They started to pick up on the game rather quickly but aren't quite ready to verbalize the WHY element.  We'll keep working on it and they'll get better with time.

Tot School Pumpkins

Pumpkin day is oodles of fun in tot school.  There was a whole lot of this going on all day: 

 We played with sensory tubs filled with pumpkin buckets and pumpkin erasers and orange and green rice.  There was also a pumpkin ball that kids took turns rolling to each other.  It was really fun to watch the kids as they found others to play pass with.    We also did oodles of art today.  We had white paper cut into big pumpkin shapes and used glue and tissue paper to decorate them.  We also colored all over our pumpkins with washable markers, washed it off with a baby wipe, then colored on them again!  During art time we also cut open a pumpkin.  We made the sound of /c/ (also known as the /k/ sound) while we were cutting.  When you cut your pumpkins or practice cutting at home for the next little bit practice the letter c by saying /c/ /c/ /c/ as you are cutting.

We were able to spend about 10 minutes at the end of the day outside.  They got to play with mini pumpkins outside.  It was fun to watch them take the pumpkins for rides, cover them in sand in the sandbox and pile them in the flower boxes on the play house.  We had a fantastic day.  Check out our pumpkin tot pack here!

Caterpillars and a Preschool Reading Lesson

We had a great day learning all about caterpillars and butterflies.  We talked about the life cycle and some of the key words (like cocoon) that they'd encounter in their reading.  Everyone got 5 'C' stickers and got to look through all the reading books that we had about caterpillars.  They were so engaged in looking at the pictures and finding the letter C within the text. 

 We continued our reading lessons following the Amazing Action Alphabet.  Grab our caterpillar preschool lesson plans here!

 We had oodles of fun doing leaf rubbings, cutting leaves like crazy, and practicing the vocabulary "near" and "far".

Sometimes when we're working with preschoolers it's good to see how a lesson might actually happen.  Today I spent about 5 minutes per kid in some one-on-one reading lesson time.  I took video of a few of the kids, but due to the nature of the beast there are names used etc so I can't post them all.  Here is my reading lesson with EMan (now 3yrs 2months).  I haven't edited it so it's very realistic to what really happens in our little classroom.