Growing Our Muscles!

You just can't plan for these things in the classroom... Today we spent almost the whole time talking about growing our muscles, including our brains.  It started out with a child saying his hand was too tired to practice writing any more. My gut reaction was filled with enthusiasm, "GREAT! That means you're growing your muscles!" Promptly EVERYONE in the class had tired hands, legs and heads.  Thus, the conversation of growing muscles continued throughout the day.  "Shh!! Watch! He's growing his brain!" was said more than once as a child was demonstrating or sharing with the group.  It was so much fun!

 Today we reviewed the letter P and added the sight word "ball".  The kids had so much fun "taking a picture" mentally of the word so they could remember it.  We also continued our conversation about clock letters practicing the letter C.  In math we're wrapping up our number sense unit and had the opportunity to play a few games again.  We made ten frames with Q-tips, tornadoes made our base ten blocks get thrown all around and they needed sorting back onto decimal street, we built the 1-20 chart and made chains 20 links long.

It was such a fun day of learning!

Play Ball and Ocean Animals

In preschool this morning we introduced the letter P with a "Play Ball!" theme.  We had tons of fun playing with different types of sports balls and talking about our favorite sport to play.  We used the foot print words under contact paper to play our reading ball game.  Everyone got a ball at the beginning, read the letter or word of each step they would step on and then shot a basket at the end.  They seemed to love it.  We talked about P the Pelican popping popcorn from the Amazing Action Alphabet and glued popcorn onto the activity page. 

 Each child got a couple baseball reading wheels today.  Check their binder for them.  We spin the wheel and say the letter name/sound or read the word.  The sight word "ball" was a new sight word today that needs to be memorized.  We continued our "Guess My Secret Rule" game in math.  Some of the kids were able to make their own sets without prompting and were allowed to go play the game as a group.  The rest of the group made sets with me following a step by step instruction.  "Take 3 blocks that are the same." (Interestingly difficult for them).  "Take 1 block that is different from the 3 you already had." (Relatively easy).  "Which block is different in your set?" (Difficult). "Why" (even more difficult).  PLEASE play this game at home to help us move forward in class!

This afternoon we had some fantastic reading lessons.  We practiced our nonsense words and sounds to warm up and then dove into some hard core reading.  We worked on the strategies readers should use when they get to a word they don't know.  There are 8 strategies in my February Dr. Seuss Preschool pack that we covered.  We'll continue referencing them as we're reading more difficult text.  We also talked about giving a 5 finger retell (1. Characters 2. Setting 3. Beginning 4. Middle 5. End). 

 We talked about ocean animals with the letter J this afternoon.  We read lots of books about ocean animals and found a great page in the encyclopedia that talks about the ocean.

 We continued our patterning in math by making patterns with giant beads.  We practiced making the patterns that were shown on the pattern cards today.  At the end of the day we enjoyed drawing with chalk in our notebooks.  The kids often talk about how their parents are going to be so proud of their art when they get the journal at the end of the school year.  It's so cute!

Insects and Play Ball!

What a great day of learning!  In our morning class we talked all about Insects and the letter I.  We learned the sight words "I" and "my" and did some great hand print art from the Amazing Action Alphabet Activity Book. We spent lots of time in small groups today really working on learning our letters and sounds and blending the letters to make words.  Remember to reference the blending video found here to help you with reading at home.  We also got to pull out the rhythm sticks to start our month long study of rhythm in music.  Boy did we love that!

In their binders today you'll find the homework in the front pocket.  It's a game called "Catch that Bug!".  Spread out the bugs from the baggy (foam insects from Oriental Trading) and after successfully reading each word "catch" one of the bugs with tweezers and put it on the paper bug jar.  See if you can read all the words in the whole packet!  This is the only homework this week.  It would be very beneficial if you could work on it every day!

Our afternoon class started off with a bang reading, "Pete the Cat, Play Ball!"  It's impressive how many of these kids (3 and 4 year olds) can read SO MUCH of this book already by themselves.  We learned the sight word "ball" and the letter p today.  Continue your work at home reading the mini readers every day and add to it the Pete the Cat book.  Remember to read the big words and encourage them to read the highlighted words that they've been working on (we highlight the appropriate words with highlighter tape in class).

We'll be beginning our unit on patterning on Wednesday so we got to play with the HUGE tub of unifix cubes in math today.  They made towers that went the whole length of the room and had a blast!

Animals in Winter

We had such a great time in preschool today.  I just love this top picture of all of them in our Bear Den.  They loved playing "Bear Family" and pretending to hibernate in our cardboard box den.  We continued working on letter P today as well as working on our Guess My Secret Rule game.  We read many stories about animals in winter and acted out hibernating and migrating.  They are such cute kids!

Tot School - Animals in Winter

We had such a fantastic day learning all about animals in winter.  We talked about the letter P and loved playing on the SmartBoard Starfall.com game.  We built dens and burrows out of blocks, dressed up in winter clothing and pretended to be animals hibernating in a big cardboard box den.  One of our favorite activities was reading "The Mitten" and acting it out.  As we came to each new character each child got to hold a mask and be that character.  Our favorite part of when the bear sneezes at the end, "ahh, ahh, ahh...choo!" and all the animals flew out of the mitten!

Play Ball!

We had a great day in school today. Our class was a little small due to illness but that just means that we got more one-on-one time than usual.  Our theme was "Play Ball" with the introduction of the letter P and sight word "ball". We read a number of books right away this morning all about baseball. One of my favorites is the Berenstain Bears Play T-Ball.  It describes how to play the game in a very simple story.  After reading all our books we got out the T-ball equipment and got to work playing!

 We had popcorn for snack to go along with the letter P.  After snack time we glued the extra popcorn into P shapes.  We did more baseball reading and enjoyed playing our math game with attribute blocks.  We're still playing "Guess My Secret Rule" where we have a set of 4 objects, 3 have the same attribute and 1 is different.  Kids are working on creating their own sets to try and trick Miss Amanda.  We had a lot of fun playing today!