Planting Seeds, Constructing Numbers and Enjoying Spring

I LOVE when the Planting Seeds theme falls on a warm spring day.  It makes it so much nicer for me to clean up.  We spent the morning cutting out pictures from seed catalogs and gluing them in our notebooks.  We also used liquid glue to make seed pictures and we practiced our letters on the big outdoor chalkboards.

 We got VERY muddy when we got to work planting our very own pea plants.  We had to squish the soil with the water and then fill our little pots with it.  Then we planted our peas and enjoyed playing in the yard.

 This afternoon we spent a chunk of time learning about our "Constructing Numbers" game.  It's a download from differentiatedkindergarten.blogspot.com and I LOVE using it with my 4 year old class.  There are cards with the numerals on it and hidden pictures of the blocks.  The kids make their representation of the numerals in the tens and ones boxes and then can self check to see if they made it correctly by lifting the flap.

 We then were able to go outside and do our group reading lesson of "Biscuit in the Garden".  We love reading Biscuit books and I'm so proud of these kids for being able to read the majority of the book by themselves.  We had a little time at the end and the kids created "Rainbow Power" where they got power by putting chalk on their skin.  I had stepped inside to put books in folders and came back to colorful children.  What fun!

Picnics and Outdoor Reading

We had perfect weather to talk about picnics today and play outside.  We had a great time in the backyard exploring the sandbox and play house as well as the rock climbing wall.

 We learned the letter Y and talked about the numeral 1.  We did all of our lessons outside except for writing/drawing.  At that point the kids were tired and hot so we came in for a nice calm end or our day.

 This afternoon we spent the whole day outside.  The kids love the spring weather and it is so much nicer to review sight words and practice reading on a porch swing.

 I was able to read with almost every child individually, introduce them to their new sight words and check to see which ones they're still struggling with from past lessons.  We're continuing our guided reading lessons that are focusing on developing fluency in reading CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.

Giggles and Gumdrops

What a fun day of preschool!  This morning we talked about the letter G with Giggles and Gumdrops.  G is a tricky sound to make.  I encourage kids to tip their head back and feel their throat to make the /g/ in the back of their throat rather than in the front of their mouth like /j/.  We read some very silly stories that really made us giggle!  Art and math were combined twice today.  We made fun gumdrop graphs and then made shapes out of gumdrops and toothpicks.  The gumdrops and toothpicks went home and you're welcome to decide their fate (they are technically spice drops, which aren't as commonly liked among preschoolers).  Then we  headed downstairs for math.  We talked about the four main shapes (circles, squares, triangles, rectangles).  One of the activities we did was to make lists of all the things around us that were each shape (clocks, beds, pizza, windows, etc.).  Please continue this conversation at home by pointing out different shapes in the environment. 

This afternoon we started our day with a number recognition activity.  Each child was given a pirate number graph and a die.  They rolled the die and colored in a square that matched the same numeral (dotted die and numeral sheet).  I was mostly watching to see if everyone knew their numbers 1-6.  This was a great activity to start recognizing groups of dots in specific patterns.  Every time you think of 4 you can easily picture the 4 dots on a die, right?  That's what I want our preschoolers to be able to do.  Know immediately the number represented on all of the sides of a d6.  (My husband told me I should just use d6 because I complained that writing the singular version of  dice over and over in a preschool blog was making me feel a little uncomfortable.  But he also warned me I'll sound like a Dungeons and Dragons player, which I'm not.  Anyway, I digress...)  We also worked hard on learning the letter Y.  Every student that is working on the Amazing Action Alphabet mini books said the /y/ sound as a /w/.  We worked on making our mouth ready to say the letter name "E" to say the /y/ correctly.  We then made great headway in our Ready2Read packets.  Every group should be finishing their current unit or even starting a new one on Wednesday.  Yay!

We read "Where the Wild Things Are" and drew our favorite parts and added words.  Each child took a turn sharing their book report with the rest of the class.  I was impressed with some new confidence in this exercise as a few students are finding their public speaking voice.  I'm really loving this simple activity and how we're really growing into it.

Have a great day of learning!

Planting Seeds

We had so much fun in school today talking about planting seeds.  We made letter Y watches, played in a black bean plants sensory bin and read lots of books about planting seeds, gardening and bugs.  We had some fun art today: gluing seeds on paper and apple stamping.  We also planted pea seeds to take home and grow.  We had so much fun!

Picnics

We had a great day talking all about picnics and the letter Y.  W and Y are hard letters for preschoolers to learn.  The sound for W is pronounced at the beginning of the name Y, which makes it tricky. 

We read oodles of books about picnics and bugs at picnics, we enjoyed a picnic snack, made yo-yo's and learned about the numeral 1.