Tot School Thursday - Polar Express

We had a fantastic morning today learning all about the Polar Express.  

 EMan was so sad that his pyramid was "ripped" but he had actually cut it out that way yesterday, still, there was no consoling him.

 We did a lot of playing with trains.

 Lil'GalB helped me stir up the hot chocolate for snack.

 Playing with the Polar Express Tot Pack.

 Coloring with our gingerbread crayons in our journals.

 We made "snow" by mixing equal amounts of corn starch and shaving cream.  It has the consistency of the moon dough you can buy at the stores.  It crumbles rather easily but squishes back together to make snowballs and snowmen.

 Reading the Polar Express.  Thanks to CJ for taking pictures for me!

Polar Express - Wednesday Preschool

It was Polar Express Day today in preschool.  I watched the movie last night with my boys and VB who was visiting for the evening.  Although I LOVE the book I don't love the movie.  It isn't quite right - there are added parts that change the main characters traits and there are added scenes (I'm sure to make the movie longer) that I think are scary and don't add value to the movie.  However, that being said, it still makes me tear up every time because it is such a wonderful story about the magic of Christmas.   

We read the book first thing this morning and then worked on sorting images according to the number of syllables each word had.

 Reading groups continued to work on the letter F for this week and blending letter sounds to read words.

 VB is tapping her tooth to remember the sound that T says.

 CJ points to the words that he is reading.  Encourage your children to do this all of the time.  It is very helpful.

 Check out that letter F!

 Snack time!

 We've moved into learning to mark the graphs rather than move the objects onto the graph.

 Preschool B also wanted to learn more about the Polar Express, Santa, Elves, and Reindeer.

 RS decided to create a hide and go seek game with a picture of an elf and a Santa.  She taught us how to play and we took turns hiding and seeking for the hidden pictures.

 Cutting out our 3D shapes for the day.

 I am totally impressed with EMan's cutting skills.  Though quite a few "important" things have been cut up in the last year, he has really mastered his cutting technique.

 Gluing together her rectangular prism   She loves building these shapes, and on the first day she wanted to take my shapes home, but every day since then she's decided to leave her shape collection on my window sill.  Silly RS!

 We strung necklaces with bells and beads.

 I love this little picture of EMan during music.  He was pestering me with this awfully annoying horn.  How come his nap was only 1 hour and CJ slept for 3?  That was a little backwards.  Oh well.

Polar Express - Tot School Tuesday

I really love the Polar Express theme.  The book holds a really special place in my heart and I love sharing fantastic literature with kids.  To watch a reading of the book go to: www.storylineonline.net 

 We "rode" in cardboard boxes like a train.  We also played with different types of jingle bells, comparing their sounds.

 Watching a reading of the book and playing with trains.

 Snack time!

 Playing with the Polar Express (Preschool Pack) Printables.  This is the Hop Along the Path Game, but I just used them as retelling images for tot school.

 Shadow matching the Polar Express story from the Polar Express Tot Pack.

 Sorting people and bells.

 We've started some very basic graphing, which is a lot of fun to see who "wins" or reaches the top first.  It is a very hands on adult led activity at this point, but still a fun group game.

 They love to scribble all over the packs when we're done playing the more formal version of the games :)

 We made quite a few individual tracks to avoid issues with sharing or breaking tracks apart.  We also colored with our gingerbread crayons again and read a few more books about snow.

Snow!

It was fantastic to get snow over the weekend so we could spend Monday talking about snow.  First, we made a snowman on Starfall.com. 

 We have been learning about syllables and practiced our "Robot Speak" with different words.  Hold your hand to your chin.  Say a word in a monotone robot voice (over exaggerate the opening and closing of your mouth).  Count how many times you open your mouth for a single word.  That is how many syllables are in that word!

 We made snowflakes out of silver pipe cleaners and beads.  They should have come home and you can decorate with them or bead and re-bead them for fine-motor skills practice.

 Making the letter F art from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

 Cutting out snowflakes from coffee filters.

 Throwing our "Snowflakes" into the air and trying to keep them up by blowing on them.

 We are continuing our work on graphing.  I introduce the idea of graphing by talking about each shape/object likes to wear "hats".  Each "hat" has to match the object.  Then we count the number of "hats". You can't count the face!

 At the end of the day we got all bundled up and went outside with our kid sized spray bottles filled with water and food coloring to spray paint the snow.  It was lots of fun!

 Preschool B has been introduced to the first 40 Dolch pre-primer sight words.  We'll spend the next few weeks reviewing them before we head into the first 40 Fry sight words in January (the first 40 not counting the repeats from the Dolch list).

 We've been working with 3D shapes in math and it has been improving our cutting skills along the way.  I've used the 3D printables from all of my winter type themes and each day they get to pick out the shape they want to make.  I don't feel like kids get enough experience with 3D shapes in their flat form and building them into their 3D shape.  We've had a lot of fun with this and will be moving on to playing with coins and money next Monday.

 They like to throw the shapes like dice and see how they land.

 Writing time!