Animal Friends and Reading

This morning was so much fun playing with our Animal Friends theme!  We read "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" which is a perfect text to read the word "at".  We also read "Big Red Barn" and found all of the a's.  We had tons of fun coloring our A watches from the Moffatt Girls, playing on Starfall.com and working on our Amazing Action Alphabet activity page and handwriting page.

In math we had oodles of fun learning about MORE and LESS.  We watched a few short clips of Sesame Street characters explaining the concept and then got to work on our game.  This is a great activity to encourage identifying more and less.  If you don't have flip chips you can easily spray paint one side of a poker chip and achieve the same affect.

On Monday we had a monumental reading lesson in our morning class.  Today's monumental reading lesson was in the afternoon class.  The morning class will get this lesson in about 3 weeks, though it'll be a year long lesson.  It was such an awesome lesson that I have no pictures.  But I do have a video to walk you through it.  The video is 9 minutes in length but shows you the key parts of our reading lesson.  Please watch it to know how to support your reader at home or, if you are a teacher, watch to see the strategy I teach in my classroom.  (The video was too large and had to be split into two sections, find both below.)

In math we learned the rules to the game Compare. This game is identical to the card game "War" but sounds much nicer to call it "Compare".  Using a set of 20 cards each with a quantity of stickers 1-10 (done twice to make twenty cards) we split the deck evenly.  Each player turns over their top card at the same time and the person with more stickers gets to take both cards.  Continue play until your deck is gone.  Then pick up the cards you "won" and repeat.  This is a fantastic game to be playing at home!

Preschool B enjoyed drawing and writing with colored pencils today and we had a fantastic time doing the "Freeze Dance" during music.  It was a great week of learning!

Wednesday Preschool - Plants

If you haven't noticed yet, I love plants and gardening.  I'm always really excited to teach the kids little snippets of things I'm passionate about, and teaching about plants was one of those really fun days. 

 We started the day with puzzles again.  We're going to continue working on them every day for our starter activity for the rest of the year.  We have some kids who are working on 12 piece puzzles and others that work in teams on 48 piece puzzles and everything in between.  Keep working on them at home if they are challenging for your little one.

 We went upstairs to draw in our journals.  We got to draw a plant and then we talked about all the parts of a real plant and if we forgot to draw a part of it we added it to our drawing.

 We also talked about the needs of a plant and how plants need air, sun and water.  We cut open a piece of celery and talked about the small tubes inside of it that act as straws to suck the water up into the plant.  Then I put a piece of celery in red water so we could investigate it later.  (and that later never arrived... everyone was out the door before I remembered it again... oops.)

 Then we dissected seeds to see what the parts of a seed were.

 If you've never looked before, this is the best shot of the baby plant inside a seed that I could get.  The long part will become the stem and the "fish tail" at the end is actually 2 really small leaves that will become the first leaves of the plant.

 Our numbers and counting activity was to glue the correct number of seeds (split peas) onto a numbered stick.  So if the stick was labeled "5" we glued 5 seeds onto it.  This was completely independent (other than me occasionally identifying a numeral for a child), so if there are correct or incorrect numbers on your child's project it's a great assessment of what they know.

 To get some movement into our day we got to walk/run/skate/tip-toe around the house to a song called "Listen and Move".  It's a great movement activity song.

 We also practiced number sense with numerals by putting the correct number of dots on large foam numbers from TouchMath.

 In afternoon preschool we got to read an "easy" book today.  It's more about the fluency and building confidence as readers since the next few books we'll be doing will take quite a bit more patience.  They won't be any harder to decode, but the text is longer (multiple sentences per page).

 When your kids are reading their books to you please listen for fluency.  They shouldn't be pausing between each word.  If the sentence ends with a question mark their intonation should represent that.

 We played a fun matching game with some sight words that we've known for many months and are "so easy".  (Is this a theme?  It seems that all day they kept telling me how easy things were.  I guess I'll be bringing on the challenges on Monday :)

 We're continuing to work on representing quantities with base ten blocks.  They each advanced to slightly higher numbers and will continue to get higher number cards (up to making 99 with this game, and possibly making numbers up to 999 with another).  Keep playing this at home.  The more they understand what each number in a numeral represents and how to show it the more they'll understand the manipulation of numerals (addition, subtraction, etc).

 We decided at the end of the day that we'd explore the play-dough.  The game apparently turned into some form of "making cookies for Santa".  It was fun to listen to their conversations about it.

Wednesday Preschool - Planting Seeds

Spring is in the air and we're planting seeds at Little Adventures Preschool! First, we started with ice cube trays and children's tweezers.  The goal was to sort all the beans into the tray according to type (color).

 We had a review of #1 and introduced #2.  These number packets will be coming home with kids next week.  Please use a wet erase marker or a dry erase crayon to complete the pages. This is the new homework and should be done a minimum of a few times a week, every day if possible.

 We did seed art today.  Each child got their own bottle of glue and was instructed to make a flower out of the seeds. They turned out very cute.

 We also planted our own seeds.  We started by poking holes in the bottom of egg cartons (so the water could drain).

 Then we filled up the holes with dirt.

 And added seeds. We planted 8 peas, 1 sunflower and 1 pumpkin.  Keep them warm and moist at home and plant them outside when they pop up.

 We're practicing writing the number 2 in the air.

 We've been learning Old MacDonald on the piano.  It's so fun to watch them pick up the patterns.

 Afternoon preschool started with sorting beans as well (who can pass on an awesome activity that is already out and ready to play with?).

We also practiced reading our level C DRA reading books.

 Since we've been working on fluency, we started recording our reading and listening to the recording.  They get a kick out of this, and if you have the availability to record at home please do.

 Our math challenge increased today.  I had the kids put the numbers in the calendar chart and they discovered that the calendar doesn't follow the same patterns as the 100 chart.

 Art today was a chalk exploration outside.  Yay for being able to be outside more often.

Monday Preschool - Picnics

We had so much fun with our picnic theme on Monday for preschool.  We spent the whole day outside exploring the play food, the letter Y, the number 1, learning the Teddy Bear's Picnic song, and just having a good time. 

 We're still working on our CVC letter swap game.  CVC stands for Consonant, Vowel, Consonant.  They are short vowel words like "cat".  We swap out a letter and see what new word we can make.

 Our yummy picnic.

 We've been working on our cutting skills and we're starting to show improvement.  Please let your kids cut up all your junk mail and newspapers when you're done with them.  It's an important skill that has to be learned and practiced.

 We've started our math module about numerals.  Today's day was the number 1.  Each day will have a numeral and we'll talk about them in numerical order. Start pointing out numbers to your kids in their daily life.

 We went inside to dance to the Teddy Bear Picnic song at the end of the day.  They had so much fun!

 Afternoon preschool started outside in the nice warm springtime air.

 We went through the 40 sight words (Jan-May) and put a check mark or a dot next to the ones we were successful at reading.

 Then I plugged the words each child still needed to work on into a bingo sheet for practice.

 We've been working on level C books.  We're focused on the comprehension of the stories and reading fluently.  Please have your child read their reading books every day.  Even multiple times a day if possible (to mom, dad, grandparents, even the family pet or a teddy bear).  The idea is to read them so many times that they have it memorized and can read it fluently, like they talk rather than pausing between each word like a robot.

 As they read or you read to them be sure to talk about the characters in the story, where the story takes place, and what the main idea of the story is.

 We had a challenge today in math.  I took out every other row of cards on our 100 chart, mixed them up and had the kids put them back where they go.

 They did surprisingly well and were fantastic at helping each other out and fixing mistakes.