Wednesday's Review and Assessments

I really love this time of year when we get to play and work more one-on-one together.  I LOVE seeing the data of how much these guys have learned!  Over the weekend we had a VERY wet and heavy snowfall (9 inches on Mother's Day!).  Due to that we lost an aspen tree in the back yard.  After seeing how much fun my kids had playing on it we decided to leave it for a while before cutting it up.  It makes the perfect half seesaw just a foot or two off the ground.  There are additional scrapes on kiddos today from their attempts to "climb" it and bounce on it, but boy did they have fun!

 We had the opportunity to release ladybugs in our afternoon class.  Some of the kids really loved playing with them for a bit before they flew off.  Others kept their distance. :).  I shared one of my favorite stories with the kids today: "Click, Clack, Moo Cows that Type".  It is such a fun book and we enjoyed reading it together.

Review and Spring Assessments and Goal Setting

I love this time of year.  I get to take the opportunity to work with each child individually and jot down notes about what they've learned throughout the year.  It is so awesome to see how much they've grown physically and educationally.  We read and play games.  We do a couple assignments that help me take notes about pencil grip and cutting skills.

 Best of all, we compile a folder of all the information with examples of work.  I am getting so excited to show these off to parents next Monday.  It's a wealth of information about what they've worked on and is a great starting point for writing goals for the future.  What a great spring!

April Showers Bring May Flowers

This morning in preschool we talked about April Showers.  We talked all about the water cycle and used our recent experience of being wet on Monday and drying in the sun to talk about evaporation.  We acted out the water going up to the sky, making a cloud, and then raining down on us.  We reviewed the letters we've already learned and talked about numerals up to 6.

 This afternoon we worked on our constructing numbers game and started a couple kids on the numerals 50-100.  I did one-on-one assessments to determine which kids were ready for more in reading and math.  Math will keep us on the 100 chart for the next few weeks at least.  Many kids are ready to attack non-decodable texts now in their guided reading groups so we'll be able to move forward and have guided reading groups more similar to what they'll experience in Kindergarten classrooms.  Great learning today!

Wheels in Preschool

This morning in preschool we had a letter review.  We got to play with wheels and talk more about the different shapes around us.  We played with all the vehicle toys and cut out pictures of wheels and trucks.

 We had a fantastic time in art today.  We cut out pictures of vehicles and glued them onto our pages according to if they were facing right or left.  Then we painted using toy vehicles to spread the paint all around.  We continued our discussion about shapes and talked about what shapes would roll the best.

 This afternoon we dove right into our Ready2Read and guided reading lessons.  We talked about letter X and had a great time reading the book "Max" by the Amazing Action Alphabet.

 We also spent time discussing the numbers 9-15.  We made a tape version of the tens and units homes.  We used unifix cubes and our big number mats.  We're still working on understanding that a stick of 10 is 1 stick of 10 units.  I'm hoping to really get a hang of what the numbers up to 20 mean so we can start working on counting to 100 next.  And not just the counting of it, the UNDERSTANDING of it!

Sharing and Manners

Today was a great day learning all about sharing and manners.  We had a review of letters in the morning and the kids are doing fantastic!  We started the day playing with puzzles.  If your child struggles with 12 piece puzzles I'd highly suggest getting a couple for Christmas and practicing with your child.  Being able to put a puzzle together is a problem solving skill that needs to be learned.  We simply don't have enough time to practice enough in school.  We had a blast fishing for letters during our review.  Once a letter was caught we sang the "Every Letter Makes a Sound" song for that letter and then put it back for someone else to catch.  We enjoyed art time drawing pictures in our notebooks and working on a secret art craft that turned our toes green!  We learned about graphing in math today.  It was an introduction that used hats as the example.  We only wear our own hats and they have to go right on top of our head or they will fall off if we put them up too high.  They did great for a first introduction!  We also played "Motorboat" for music time talking about the tempo of music, boy did they love that!

 This afternoon we also talked about sharing and manners.  Our focus, however was the letter N and naughty behaviors.  We learned the sight word "no" and read the book "No, David!"  We talked about N the naughty newt painting with nail polish and then had a chance to paint with nail polish in our notebooks (yes, my house is still stinky)!  We also worked on a secret art project that turned our toes green.  That should wash off quickly :).

Nursery Rhymes and Lots of Reading!

What a great day of learning!  Preschool A spent the day learning and playing with Nursery Rhymes.  We learned a few more nursery rhymes from our song that we'll perform at our year end celebration.  We made sparkling stars for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, mittens for 3 Little Kittens, played with blocks, farm animals and practiced reading letters m, t and a!

 Preschool B had a great letter review lesson and then set to work reading and finding letters in their encyclopedia.  Find the page that is marked with a tab and read it with your child before class on Monday.  We also spent time reading one-on-one, coloring and drawing in our journals, playing music, dancing and practicing counting flip chips!

May Preschool

May preschool is so much fun!  We review all of what we've learned throughout the year - and that's A LOT!  We practice our reading, writing, drawing, singing, math, puzzles and have an all around good time.  I do a one-on-one assessment with each child to figure out what they know and what we'll be working on together next.  Find review activities and the assessment to do with your kids at home or school here.  We had a fantastic year of learning and I look forward to seeing most of these kids in Preschool B in August.  Happy Summer everyone!

Animals in Spring - A Preschool Chick Experience

Wow! Talk about a great day in school!  How fun is playing with baby chicks for the "Animals in Spring" theme?  With the bigger preschoolers we were able to sit in the kiddy pool and let the baby chicks explore.  

 This is a great photo grouping of how nearly everyone reacted.  1. "I'm not certain about this..." 2. "They're climbing on me!" 3. "This is so exciting!" 4. "I love chicks!"  It took a little bit to get accustomed to each other but in the end everyone was happy to have one climb on their lap and be able to pet it.  We even held out little grains of their food for them and loved watching them jump from one person's lap to the next.

 The rest of our day included our lesson in spelling, which is a great activity if you haven't looked into it yet.  Up to this point in the year we've been working on reading words written down.  Now we're talking about how the words that come out of our mouths are just combinations of letters that we can then write down.  Check out the "Animals in Spring" pack for more information. We also did a group reading of "Mouse's First Spring" a book with many little words that the preschoolers can already read.  The bonus is that they each got to keep a copy of the book.  In math we learned about the nickel.  In preschool it's purely introduction and they love it.  We sang our pocket song to "Shortning Bread".  It goes like this: "Which coin is in my pocket, pocket? What's in my pocket worth __ cents? (then they guess what it is and we continue) It's a shiny ____, _____.  It's a ____ worth ___ cent."  The kids love it!

Animals in Spring

We had so much fun in school today talking about animals in spring.  We had our sensory bin with green rice, Easter grass and plastic eggs galore out for exploring.  We also had poker chips and large crayon banks that we sorted the chips according to color into.  Between those two stations everyone was very busy at work until snack time.  We learned "Popcorn Popping" a song about the blossoms on fruit trees looking like popcorn.  

 We also had a few large cardboard boxes out to talk about them as dens and the animals are starting to wake up in spring time. The kids loved eating snack around the baby chicks.  They were so excited about watching their every move!

 We enjoyed popcorn art that went along with our song, read oodles of books and had an enjoyable time playing outside.  Yay for springtime!

Preschool Nursery Rhymes 1-28 and 1-30

We had so much fun reviewing the letters we've already learned (MTASBHCILPFJOND) during Nursery Rhyme week.  We stamped and colored, played with magnets, sandpaper letters, Starfall.com and Starfall Speedway.  We started practicing singing the song "Hot Cross Buns" so that we'd be familiar with it while learning to play it on the piano.  

We had such a great week!