Safety, Salt, Smoke Detectors and Lots of Reading!

What a fantastic day of learning!  We had so much fun this morning with "Fireman Sam" (the hand puppet) as the teacher of the class.  He helped us review our letters, read us stories about firemen, helped us read and even showed us the smoke detector.  It was loud when it beeped, but now we know what it is for and what it sounds like!  We had tons of fun playing in trays of salt during art time.  We discussed "tall" and "short" during math and drew in our journals about what we learned today.  It was so much fun!

 Preschool B took reading to heart today as we practiced our new game "Making Words" as a class.  It's a great activity in the Bubbles extension pack if you need a printable.  We are practicing blending from one sound to the next in our reading.  We also found an interesting page in our encyclopedia and pointed out the names and sounds of the letters to our sock monkeys.  We read one-on-one with Miss Amanda today and each child is doing fantastic.  Not to be outdone by the morning class, we also played with salt today and it always amazes me how much they LOVE this activity and how long they are fully engaged in it.

Happy learning!  We'll see you all on Monday!

Spiders, Bubbles and a Hail Storm

This morning's class was all about the letter S as we talked about Spiders, Miss Muffet and the word "the"!  It was jam packed with activities right from the start.  They all have a new reading book, the letter S book.  I couldn't find my stapler so they are just a sheet of paper.  You can assemble them yourself or send them back Wednesday and I'll cut and staple them for you (found it at the end of the afternoon class!).  The S book is a BIG jump into reading skills.  We are blending words like "Sam" and "at" in the book and can now make "sat".  With the introduction of the sight word "the" we now have to memorize what "the" looks like and remember it!  It's not a word that can be sounded out like the other words.  We made bracelets and a clip card game with the word "the".  PLEASE point it out everywhere until your child has it memorized!  It will give them access to much more text this year once they've mastered it.  We also had a ton of fun making spiders in art and singing spider songs!

Our afternoon class focused on the letter B with bubbles today.  We had a great time blowing bubbles in the back yard.  We even tried to blow some for the chickens who seemed more scared than thrilled with the idea :).  We headed inside when the clouds began to rumble and spent the rest of the class time in the basement with hardly any mention of the larger than grape sized hail pelting down on the world around us.  Please work on the letter B book called "Bam" as homework.

 We drew and wrote in our journals all about blowing bubbles and we played with and started discussing the attribute blocks.  We will begin classifying the blocks with our game "Guess My Secret Rule" on Wednesday.  Have a great Monday night!  I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!

Families

We had such a fun day today learning about families.  We were reviewing the letters M T and A today in our morning class.  I used a company called Create Jigsaw Puzzles to have each child's family picture made into a professional puzzle.  They turned out so fantastic!  Each child has their puzzle as homework.  Keep them at home and do them over and over again.  The minimum goal by the end of the 3 year old preschool year is to be able to do a 12 piece puzzle.

 We had fun with our reading lesson today practicing being a blender (like the video from last week).  We are practicing words like: at, am, mat, tam.  We talked about 'tam' being a nonsense word that isn't real but fun to read.  In math we started talking about ordinal numbers.  We talked about first, second and third.  At home point out different situations like: Mom will be served fish for dinner first, Daddy second and EMan third.  It was fun to watch the 3 year olds explore drawing people.  Some have been drawing people for a while and others are brand new to the idea.  We talked about the different shapes that make up bodies and how to draw them.

Our afternoon 4 year old class got much bigger puzzles.  Unfortunately the options available are pretty much 12 pieces or 100 pieces so we jumped to the big size. This is a REALLY big challenge that kids sometimes don't master until they are 5, 6 or even 7 years old.  Practice with them at home to make your fun family photo puzzle.

We had a great reading lesson with the letter S this afternoon.  We are continuing the strategies from the video posted last week.  Sound out each word slowly, reread the word quickly, move to the next word.  At the end of the sentence go back and reread the whole sentence quickly.  This strategy may seem very repetitive right now, but the books get much harder in the next few weeks and we'll benifit from practicing this way.  Some of our afternoon kids are working on the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read level 1 and are just about done with unit 1.  We're excited to move into the next word families!  We're still working on mastering counting one-to-one in preschool.  Today we played with the pattern blocks while counting.  We also built towers, forests, dragons and other cool things with the shapes.

We had a great day of learning!  I look forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday!

Safety - Preschool

Talking about safety helps preschoolers take a possibly abstract rule and understand its importance in keeping them safe.  We love talking about safety at Little Adventures Preschool.  We start the day building puzzles and talking about firemen, policemen, medical personal, etc.  We're also working on the letter S this week as well as recognizing the sight word "the".   In the Safety Preschool Pack there are 41 pages of fantastic activities that relate to staying safe and practicing letter S and the sight word "the", including the money and pockets sorting below. 

 We loved sequencing different events that will help us stay safe, like how to cross the road safely.

 We're currently reading the letter S book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  It only includes letters that we've already studied (MTAS) and the sight word "the".  We're continuing to work on sounding out the letters in each word.  We talked about how there were spaces on the pages that didn't have any letters.  Those spaces indicate that we need to stop and reread the letters faster and faster until we can say the word.  When we can say the word we get to move onto the next word.

 During art we played with salt on plates and practiced writing the letter S and other letters that we've already learned. LilE was so excited after she wrote this S, and she should be because it looks fantastic!

 We played with the clip cards from the Spiders and Miss Muffet pack on Tuesday.  We're still working on recognizing the word 'the'.

Safety - Tot School

We had such a delightful time learning about safety this week!  We talked all about firemen and policemen and how they are there to help us stay safe. In the Safety Tot Pack {FREE download} we played a short path game where we had to get the fire dog to the firetruck. It's such a fantastic game to practice counting to 3 and moving that many spaces.

 We also sequenced firemen helmets according to size.

 We LOVED playing with our Melissa and Doug puppets today. It was important to stress throughout the day that firemen and policemen are there to help us stay safe.  They are just like moms and dads that wear a uniform to keep us safe.

 After we headed outside we enjoyed cutting paper, exploring the tot pack, playing in the sandbox and playhouse, and drawing "fire" on the chalkboard.

 We also utilized our new swing to look at books.  It was a very popular activity!

Spiders and Miss Muffet

We had oodles of fun with our Spiders and Miss Muffet theme in preschool today. We played a "Smack the Spider" game to practice the words and letters that we have already learned as well as our new letter S and word "the".

 We practiced the Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme in a number of different ways throughout the day.

 This is the first introduction to the sight word "the" for the kids.  They have to learn to memorize what it looks like because it doesn't "sound out" like the other words do.  It's the first official sight word that we learn.  I love these clip cards from the Spiders and Miss Muffet preschool pack where the kids can clip the letters on top of the guide to practice reading and making the word "the".

 We also made the sight word watch from the Moffatt Girls.

 For art today we made spiders.  We talked about how spiders have two body parts, eight legs, and many of them have eight eyes.  They practiced using the hole punch to make the eyes and got to use the glue sticks to put the spiders together.

 We then got to play with our spiders for the rest of the day.  They helped us in math to talk about long and short and they helped us in music as we sang "There's a Spider on the Floor" and many other songs about spiders!