Thanksgiving and Snow

 We had a fantastic lesson about Thanksgiving today.  We made a giant list of the things we are thankful for.  I was so proud of them for listing things like: family, books, friends, hugs, houses, someone even said "life".  What a fantastic group of kids!  We learned the letter L the Lizard and practiced making the /l/ sound.  It's such a tricky sound to make!  We continued working on "Guess My Secret Rule", this time with the silverware drawer.  The idea of the game is much like the Sesame Street game "One of these things is not like the others".  There are 3 items that match and one that is different.  The children are to identify which is different and why (such as it is bigger than the rest, it's a different color, it's a fork not a spoon). The game is actually REALLY hard and we're struggling with understanding the concept.  So... please pull out your own silverware draw, line up 4 objects (3 the same and 1 different) and ask your child which one is different and why.  Play it every day!

Preschool B had a blast talking about snow.  It was fun to read all sorts of books about snow and discuss the weather and then see that it was starting to snow outside!  We worked hard in our reading groups mastering the letter F and working on the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read program.  We moved to ABB patterns in math and they picked up the concept right away!  

Scarecrows

We had a fantastic day talking all about scarecrows.  We read stories and non fiction books about scarecrows and then got busy making our own scarecrows.  I love this activity because the scarecrows are completely adorable and the kids work really hard on their coloring and cutting to put it together.  They are so proud of their work when they were done.  Plus, along the way they get to enjoy conversation.  The conversation at the all girls table was about whether or not they each had cup holders in their cars.  It was a very memorable conversation. 

 We continued working on identifying which objects fit into a group and which don't.  Part of that is being able to verbalize "Why".  We've got a handle on the game when there is only one variable changed (all circles, 3 are yellow and 1 is red).  It gets much trickier when more than one variable is different (a triangle, a square, a circle, a rectangle - 3 are blue and one is yellow.  In this case they often say the circle doesn't fit because it's not a square... etc. Where the shape doesn't actually matter but the color is the common denominator).  I'd encourage you to play this game at home with your silverware drawer or your chest of toys, even with your shoes.  Remember there are always 4 objects, 3 of them have the same characteristic and 1 has a different characteristic.

We continued working on our L book by building the pages from it.  We talked about how it was like a puzzle and we had to match the words to the picture.  They got a kick out of fixing incorrect sentences.

Preschool Thanksgiving

On Tuesday of this week we were able to talk about Thanksgiving.  Since we already spent a day talking about the first Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Indians we were able to focus on the thankful part of Thanksgiving.  We talked about all the different things that make us thankful and read a great book called "I'm Thankful Each Day". For the rest of our lesson plans and printable activities be sure to check out our Preschool Thanksgiving Pack. 

We learned about letter L this week in many fun ways.  We searched all around the room for the letter L and put highlighter tape on all the L's we found.  We also practiced saying /l/ by licking a lollipop and making our tongue touch the top of our mouth for /l/.   

We're working on using our newly acquired descriptive vocabulary to verbalize why an item doesn't match a set in our "Guess My Secret Rule" game.  Today we used silverware to play this game.  Silverware is great because there are different types (spoon, fork, knife), different sizes and different colors or material (metal/plastic).

Overall, we had a fantastic day of learning!