Fruits

Preschool A had a fun morning learning all about fruit.  We sorted fruit by color, picked our favorites and added them to our journals.  We practiced our letter V and the funny lip vibration sound it makes.  We had fruit for snack time and many kids tried kiwi fruit for the first time.  Yum!

 We had a great time learning the numeral 4 and practicing counting the TouchPoints on the TouchMath app.  It's an easy way to visually and physically count representations to remember the numeral.  We also spent the last 15 minutes playing outside in the lovely weather, I love this time of year!

 This afternoon we started outside but it got too chilly and we came in to continue our work in comfort.  We read some of "Pippi Longstocking" and had fun conversations about all the silly things she does.  We drew and wrote about our favorite parts of the story in our journals.

 We also continued our work on our Constructing Numbers game.  It went home as homework - PLEASE play it at home AND RETURN it on WEDNESDAY (mud and worms Monday, so keep it a couple extra days to practice).  We'll add numbers 51-99 for kids who are ready for it on Wednesday.  We also worked on our guided reading groups and Ready2Read lessons.

Vegetables and Constructing Numbers

This morning we had a super fun time playing with the kitchen toys and talking all about vegetables.  We learned the letter V and made sure our sound was /v/ and not /vu/.  Try to practice isolating the sound when you teach letter sounds to kids, it will help them in their future reading.  We ate three different types of vegetables for snack time and talked about 3 servings of vegetables each day helps keep our bodies healthy.

 We also learned the numeral 3 today.  We had tons of fun playing with the TouchMath counting app.  A great one for basic recognition of numerals up to 9.  We played with the texture numeral cards and got to jump on the floor numeral mats.  You can find a lot of fun TouchMath ideas here.

This afternoon in preschool B we continued working on Constructing Numbers.  We're using unifix cubes to build the numbers up to 50.  Our focus is on understanding the tens and the units (ones) position in the number.  It's helping us be able to say the numeral if we don't know it (build it, count it) and it's helping us sort out our teens issues.  It seems that the teen numbers are always the hardest to master, they don't follow any of the rules of the higher numbers (like stating the tens before the units).

 We also worked on our guided reading lessons with baggy books and Ready2Read.  I'm loving the "Now I'm Reading" sets that we are using right now to help us solidify sounding out short vowel words.  We're also working in level 2 and B to practice utilizing other strategies like "beginning sound" and "picture clues" to help us figure out what the word says.

Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!  A few kids pointed out that today was in fact not Valentine's day.  However, since we don't have school on Saturday we celebrated it today!  This morning was a blast learning about the letter U.  We used a big balloon with a capital U and a small balloon with a lower case u to practice the /u/ sound.  We made the balloon go /u/ /u/ /u/ - UP! and then tossed it to another student to repeat the action.  We also talked about all the words in the mini U book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We talked about the family of frogs in the book and acted out all the actions that they do throughout the book.  After snack time each child got a box of heart candies to sort and graph.  We practiced one-to-one counting and determining which color and the most and the least. 

 After math we handed out Valentines to our friends with our decorated Valentine bags and then did a letter review game with balloons.  Each balloon had a letter on it.  The idea of the game was to look at the letter on the balloon and then sing the song about the letter name and sound ("N says /n/, N says /n/, every letter makes a sound, N says /n/").

 This afternoon we read a fun story called "The Day it Rained Hearts".  It's a simple and sweet story about a little girl making Valentine cards out of hearts that rained from the sky. Each child then drew their favorite part and added words to their drawing.  We then took turns sharing our work with the whole class.

 We did our regular guided reading groups today so everyone has 2 new baggy books to be reading.   For math we repeated our lesson from last Wednesday about units and sticks of 10.  Then we got out our math cards and paired up to play the matching game.  PLEASE play this game LOTS at home!

We had a great time playing outside for a bit.  Cheering for kids who completed Ready2Read units, coloring Valentine bags and handing out our Valentines.  It was a great day!

Preschool Fruit Theme

What a fantastic day of school!  We've been learning so much lately in school.  Our theme today was "Fruit" (makes sense with the theme "Vegetables" on Tuesday).  We started with puzzles, a repeated activity we'll do for the rest of the year.  We read a few books about fruit including "End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad" a fantastic book that you'll find a post about (and a giveaway!) later today. We continued with our guided reading lesson working on level A pre-reader texts.  Wonder why we're working on these texts since we've been using decodable texts all year?  Check out V is for Vegetable for more clarity. 

Another super fun aspect of our day today was that on our property we have about 10 different fruit trees and plants.  We were able to go on a nature walk just in our little area and talk about each of the different plants.  We searched for flowers that were starting to pop out and talked about if we don't bother them the bees will pollinate the flowers and fruits will grow.  We talked about the different shapes and colors of the different leaves and flowers. 

After returning inside we talked about numeral 4.  There is a great little series of books I read from Scholastic called "Number Stories".  There is a number chant at the end of each book and the kids love it!  They get to clap and stomp and jump and turn all for the number of the day.  It's so much fun.  Check out our full lesson plans for the Preschool Fruit Theme here. 

Fruits and Vegetables

Fruits and Vegetables was a great theme to do outside.  It seems Colorado weather is letting us go outside about every other week now.  Hopefully we'll be outside all of May!  We played in the sandbox, playhouse and with all the other outside toys at first.  It was rather hard to attract anyone to any of my fruit and vegetable activities, they were all having such fun!  At snack time (which lasted longer than 30 minutes, by the way) we sampled a variety of vegetables and fruits.  We started with the vegetables.  Everyone got one of something (snap peas, broccoli, carrots, etc.) and then we'd talk about the color, taste and texture.  Next we'd compare it to what we ate last.  After the vegetables were gone I pulled out the fruits and we repeated the exercise comparing fruits to vegetables and fruits to fruits.  It was so much fun!

One of our favorite activities was painting with broccoli.  It makes such a fantastic little paintbrush!  We also played with the kitchen quite a bit, making all sorts of fruit and vegetable concoctions.  Ask your toddler if they remember how to make a V in sign language.  V is for vegetables!  

V is for Vegetables

Learning about letter V is so much fun!  It makes our lips tickle to make the sound!  We started off our day working on puzzles, a fantastic tool to work on visual perception, fine-motor skills, thinking, reasoning and logic.  We're attempting to make the jump from 12 piece puzzles to 24 piece puzzles.  The 12 piece ones are still a challenge to a few of us so we'll keep working on those.  We also took the time today to let the preschoolers update the calendar to represent April (a little late I know).  It was a great counting and number placement activity for us.

Today we also started work on pre-reading books.  Pre-Reading skills are the skills that a person needs before they can become a reader.  Many of these skills are learned through natural introduction from the adults and “big kids” in a child’s life.  We have started more formal guided reading lessons using the Scholastic GRL A book set.  This set is helpful because there are multiple copies of each book so everyone can have their own to read.   There are a few goals I have in mind with these books:

·        Direction: Text goes from left to right.  We read books from left to right.
·        Concepts of print: How we handle books is a skill.  Can you hold it right side up?  Can you turn the pages the correct direction and only one page at a time?  Can you find the text on the page?  Do you know that the words tell the story?
·        Patterns: Literature often has rhythm and patterns in it.  These pre-readers are set up with repetitive text and a predictable picture-clue to the new vocabulary on each page.
·        Memorization: In order to be successful readers we have to memorize certain things like letter names and sounds.  The first step to this is memorizing the repetitive text.
·        Acting like a Reader: Reading is fun when we are successful.  It can also be really frustrating if we aren't being successful.  By memorizing the text and acting like a reader before being able to actually read the words we can be successful with just the basic skills.  Please don’t correct a child if they say the words differently than the text; praise them for their story telling and read the book again and again to them and they’ll pick up the memorization on their own.
·       Utilize our reading strategy known as "Get Your Mouth Ready".  While pointing at the words we get our mouth ready to say the beginning sound of the word.  Even if we can't yet successfully decode the word we can remember the rhythm and rhyme and be prompted by the beginning sound.

Find a set of free printable pre-reading books here.
Based on our theme we also read tons of books about vegetables, including our favorite "Tops and Bottoms".  It's a fantastic book about the parts of each plant that are considered food.  Be sure to check out the blog for upcoming posts for a book giveaway of this book and one other!