We are writers!

I love my job.  The amazing growth that happens with preschoolers is fast paced and so fun to watch.  Today we played with magnets, read one-on-one with Miss Amanda and worked on our Ready2Read lessons.  I know I've been writing a lot lately about writing.  I just can't help myself when these kids are making writing leaps and bounds.  Today we reviewed how we can stretch words to know what letters to write.  We talked about how sometimes there is a kid way to spell things and an adult way to spell things and because adults aren't always great at reading kid spellings I occasionally write the adult spelling above the attempted spelling.  The kids also led us to a mini lesson on using our sight word chart hanging on the wall to know how to spell sight words correctly.  They also helped us all recognize that using our finger to make a space between words makes it easier for our eyes to read.  So many of these kids are tackling great big sentences already!  Today kids wrote sentences like "I like breakfast the most." and "My favorite water bottle has an orange lid." and "The cat is loving friends."  Of course they were written in kid spelling, but they were written!  We've graduated past the scribbles, random lines, and drawings being the main form of sharing a message.  We are writing.  And we love it!

 A quick picture of our jumping as we counted to 100 of course :).  Have a great weekend, happy learning!

Halloween is in the air!

Today was such a fantastic day in preschool!  We played on Starfall.com and read some Halloween stories to get started.  Then everyone helped decorate the classroom by cutting out pictures and taping them to the walls. 

 Every year we make "Ghost Footprints".  On a paper cut like a haunted house we paint our feet white and add ghosts.  A little tip - wrap completed feet in baby wipes to help with the cleanup process.  Also, having a trampoline for kids when their done is an added bonus since it takes time one-on-one to complete the painting part.  We'll write in our haunted houses on Thursday and then send our art home.

 We also worked on our books about Halloween and added skeleton bones to our body maps.

For math we worked on AB patterns with Halloween images, it was tons of fun!

Writing about Halloween

We began our preschool day working on our books about Halloween.  We're writing and illustrating our own stories about our costumes and traditions.  As each child finished the writing portion of their book we glued their picture to the back and they wrote some information about the author.  It was so fun to see them really take ownership of their work. 

 We had so much fun reading Halloween stories with half of the lights turned off for a "spooky" effect.  Then we spread around the room to practice our decodable reading books.  We finished up the day working once more on graphing.  I know I told you that we were done with that on Tuesday.  I lied.  Turns out I failed to do coloring graphing, we only did cut and paste examples and the concept didn't cross over.  After working on it today the concept clicked.  There is an empty page on the back that they can practice again at home.

The Importance of a Finger Space

Today in preschool we started work on our own book that mimics a book called "This is my Halloween".  It is an easy reader and we're utilizing the pattern to write similar books with words and pictures that match our own personal Halloween stories and costumes.  After reading our mentor text a few times we were ready to get started.  A mentor text is a book that does something that we want to try and do in our own writing.  "This is my ..." is the repeating phrase we'll be using within our own books about our costumes, family and traditions.  As we were working a teachable moment arose when I noticed so many books looked like this: ThisismyHalloween.  Insert a lesson about the importance of a finger space.  Here is the idea: between every word there is a space so we know the old word is over and a new one will begin.  In the beginning writing stages using a finger space, actually putting your finger down after a word and starting your new word on the other side of your finger, the space becomes a concrete part of the writing process.  Try to encourage the use of the finger space if your kids are doing any writing at home (which I highly encourage!). 

 Our work on our decodable and leveled reading books continued today with great success.  There may have even been M&M's involved.  Boy those little mini M&M's encourage kids to try sounding words out immediately instead of staring off into space.  With the little motivation I was thrilled to see the fantastic progress that the whole group is making.  Keep it up!  In fact, the progress was so awesome that I'm going to ditch the rest of the alphabet review entirely.  Expect a new calendar with updated information soon!  We finished our short unit on graphing today with a little cut and glue project and then had a blast with an introduction to making thumbprint Halloween creatures.  We'll be using thumbprint creatures for the next 3 days in our build up to Halloween.  Happy learning everyone!

Writing Workshop Takes Off in Preschool!

We had such a fun day of school today.  I'm very impressed with the writing we are producing already.  Today we had a nearly complete actual story about Batman.  It had a cover, a beginning, and a middle.  We talked about how fun it was to listen to the story and how we hoped that the last page would be worked on during our next class to finish the story.  Being able to create a story line in writing form is very difficult and it's so fun to see it emerging already!  I am impressed with the attempts to sound words out and add them to our books.

Sharing what we did as authors today.

 We continued working on reviewing the alphabet today.  We added the letter "G" which we practiced by opening our mouths really big and making the /g/ sound at the back of our throats.  Through our interest led reading books and our decodable "Now I'm Reading" sets we had plenty of practice with the letter G.  We're continuing our graphing conversation in math using the books we read aloud each day.  Today we read three books that all had "Moon" in the title.  It was fun to talk about our favorite story out of the three and "vote" to make our graph.

Passionate Reading and Writing in Preschool

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom!  On Tuesday in preschool we used a loved classic to work on reading the word "and" as we reviewed the letter D.  We talked in great depth about how we don't write or color in books at the library, books at home, or books at Miss Amanda's house.  However, they were being gifted a special book where they had permission to highlight all of the words they know how to read in the story.  We read through the story together, highlighted the words we knew, and then read the story again...maybe even two more times.  The kids were so excited about their own books and a story many of them already loved.

 We also read two other story books and used all three read alouds from the day to make a graph of which story we liked the most.

 Yes, I really do teach kids to write this way.  In the bottom left picture you'll see how we worked on sounding out the following words: family, dump truck, Dora, Hello Kitty, villains, dinosaurs, dragons, and dino trucks.  We "grab" the word in the air and then slowly "stretch" it to find out what sounds we should write next (imagine grabbing bread dough and then stretching it long and thin).  We are not looking for accuracy in spelling here.  These guys are 4 years old, and even at 5 and 6 years old phonetic spelling is perfectly acceptable.  After we spoke in great deal about how to write words we continued our work on writing our very own books.  A few kids decided to start new books and the rest continued working on the book they started last week.  We have some great authors!  Encourage this phonetic spelling at home!

Books Galore

Books, books, books.  Today I nearly lost my voice in 2.5 hours of preschool.  The reason?  Books.  It is much more rewarding to read books with a theatrical emphasis, especially if one is sharing their favorite book that happens to be called "Where the Wild Things Are".  It just needs some roaring and eye rolling to really sell it.  Today we hit on our passions very intensely.  We talked about our favorite stories, the types of books we love to read and found something suitable for each of us from our classroom library.  We talked about how reading a book is more fun when you get into the story and read fluently.  It's less engaging when you stop part way through a sentence.  It is certainly more fun if you read it with fun voices. 

 Through a variety of high interest books and leveled readers we took time today highlighting and marking parts of fascinating  stories that we could read on our own.  Though there was a lot of jumping around to quickly find sight words we will continue our focus to hopefully start at the beginning of each sentence and do our best to actually read the majority of the text.

 Our fantastic exploration of books today led to our first writer's workshop where we each started writing our own books.  With a few sheets of paper stapled together and all the writing tools we could think of we wrote and drew stories.  There were stories about villains, being a vet, a ride at the local amusement park, a camel, a whirlwind, and a few other ideas.  The kids did fantastic with adding their name to the cover just like real authors and adding words and pictures throughout their books.

Persistent Learners

Today in preschool we talked about being persistent A LOT.  We jumped right in to work on sorting sight words with do-a-dot markers and then moved to cutting and gluing to make a 15 chart.

 There was much conversation about how the 15 chart was difficult.  It was tricky figuring out what number goes where and which direction to place the number. Often times the first time you do something it isn't easy but with practice it gets easier.  As long as we are PERSISTENT and KEEP TRYING we are GROWING OUR BRAINS!  Isn't that exciting?

 During our writing time today we jumped back into forming clock letters.  We only talked about the letter O today but we did make a capital (mommy) and a lowercase (baby) attempt.  Imagine a clock.  When we write circle shaped letters (imagine the letter "o") we start at the 2 o'clock and go counterclockwise around the clock and back to the 2.  We do the same for letters like "a" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, then straight down), "d" (start at the 2, counterclockwise to the 2, straight up to the top and straight down to the bottom).  Clock letters include: a, c, d, f, g, o, s, q.  These letters all start at the "2 o'clock" (the f starts at the 2 on the top clock).  This is an important habit to encourage at home.

 The kids were thrilled when I told them they would get to watch a movie.  Shouts of "Iron Man" and "Blues Clues" were offered up as suggestions.  Instead, we watched Steve.  He's the man in the Math-U-See curriculum videos.  We watched about 3 minutes of his segment about "Decimal Street".  Then we played the decimal street tornado game.  Each child got a page with a drawn decimal street and some unit and tens blocks.  We would all make tornado noises and mix up all the blocks.  Then when the tornado ended we had to put the units back in the units house and the tens back in the tens house.

After playing the tornado game the kids were let in on a little secret.  When we write the quantity of blocks in each house it writes the same number as there are blocks!  I explained it in more appropriate 4 year old language and we built the numbers 1-12 on the white board as we were talking through the concept.

These kiddos certainly worked hard as persistent learners today.  Great work everyone!

Preschool B - On A Schedule

Can you believe it?  We actually accomplished everything I was hoping to accomplish today in preschool B.  Yay!  It always feels better when we figure out our schedule and I figure out the right amount of material to prepare for a class.  Of course, throughout the year we'll be mixing it up a bit and sorting it out again, but for now it's the beginning of a smooth learning time!  

Our morning group reading lesson continued with discussion about sounding words out (blending them) like people and not robots.  

 We were able to then work through our reading groups mastering the skill of blending and working on appropriate phonics for each group.

 The kids were fantastic in their center rotations as we worked on puzzles and went fishing for letters.

 Our writing time today was technically drawing time.  Many kids started off this year with a blanket statement like: "I can't draw." "I can't do that." "I can't make a circle."  With this negative attitude we aren't getting anywhere with writing letters.  So instead we're drawing shapes.  We have a new "How to Draw with Simple Shapes" book in our classroom and each person picked out an item they wanted to draw.  We did quite a few as a group and then I made copies of the pages and hung them up all over the room for the kids to practice.  For the first time a couple of the resistant writers took a chance and tried.  Yay!  I sent home each child's printed page from the book in the back of their binder.  PLEASE let them practice drawing their picked item over and over again.  We'll talk on Thursday about how practice helps us get better.  PLEASE encourage them to draw a TON this week.  It really will help their writing.

 Continuing our work on drawing and writing:

 For math today I introduced ten frames for the first time.  Each child got a ten frame sheet, a Q-tip and an ink pad to stamp the correct number of dots in each ten frame.  You'll find ten frame activities starting to show up in their homework as well.  We're working on our number sense - recognizing groups of items represent the numeral and the word.

 One of the ways we work on this recognition is through a subitization game of puzzles.  As a class we sorted through the puzzle pieces and made 10 little puzzles representing each number.

I was really impressed with the kids today and their strive to help each other, accomplish the tasks I asked of them, and really work hard.  They did a fantastic job!

Creative Learning in Preschool B

After our first week of school we are all ready to dive in working on blending letters again.  We started the day off playing with the word factory on Starfall.com on the SMARTboard.  We then read, "The Way I Act" again as a class to talk about all the words that we want to use to describe ourselves.  As we talked about the words that describe ourselves we started talking about things we love, things we like to do, and what we like to think and talk about.  This led right into our body maps.  We worked cooperatively to trace each other's outlines on huge sheets of paper.  Then we worked diligently to add symbols that represented who we are.  We're going to keep working on our body maps in school for another day or two to keep adding things that represent us.

 We had a great time learning the sight word "the" (or reviewing it) and talking about picture clues.  We are going to dive headfirst into our reading strategies on Thursday and picture clues is one of the strategies we can use.  Today we read, "Harold and the Purple Crayon" for our writing time.  As we started writing last week there was a lot of "I don't know how..." and "I can't do that..." when presented with their writing notebooks.  Through the story of Harold we talked about different ways to be creative, imaginative, and represent the ideas in our heads and hearts during writing time.

 I love that the kids get a chance to share their writing at the end of writing time.  There is so much good that comes from the opportunity to share one at a time about something that you created.  It also gives me a way to listen in to their thinking about what they were drawing and writing so I can make notes on the page when I date it at the end of writing.  Though we didn't have time to get to music (again...) we did have about 3 minutes before parents came and were able to build with the blocks and trucks for a short time.

I love how creative this class was today!  I hope we can continue building on the positive energy around learning and identifying ourselves as curious, responsible, compassionate, brave, trustworthy, friendly, persistent, respectful, cooperative, capable, active, considerate and imaginative!

Preschool 9-3-2015

We had a great second day of preschool B today.  We started off the same and kept the activities very similar to day one to focus on the routine and expectations in the classroom.  After playing on the SmartBoard we reviewed our class expectations and then read a book called "The Way I Act".  I LOVE this book because it highlights good qualities in a high quality poem like format.  It helped us talk about the type of people we want to be.  Then we reviewed what centers was supposed to look like and got to work.

 During centers I met with the small guided reading groups.  We had so much fun.  We were learning about blending letters for the first time, blending the beginning into the middle sound, and were practicing our early readers with sight words and CVC phonics.

 After we cleaned up (which they did phenomenally well) we read a book about drawing pictures and writing words to match.  We talked again about how we draw in the empty space and write on the lines.  We discussed the lines and how we use them with our letters.  We also had a mini lesson about how to draw people.  We talked about using circles for the head, eyes and body and using lines for the mouth, arms and legs.  Some kids drew a person for the very first time today and it was adorable!

 After writing we got to play some math games.  We warmed up with our staircases game and then moved to building towers.  They loved building towers and the math language that came out of it was amazing.  I love that I caught the two girls comparing their towers of 6 to make sure they were the same length.  They cooperatively worked on building all the towers they could on their sheet until they ran out of blocks.  Then they started again.  I love how great they worked together!  The environment in our classroom is wonderful, there is so much compassion and desire to learn.  Keep up the great work!