Bears and Bats and Helpful Kids

Preschool had a fantastic time learning the letter B this morning.  We talked about bears and bats and read oodles of books about them.  We were able to split into reading groups to work in smaller groups on our reading for the first time today.  The kids not working with me got to "read" the books about bears and bats to a sock monkey. 

We practiced with our letter cards during reading today.  You'll find them in their binder in a Ziploc baggy.  You can play with them like we did (identify name and sound) or you can play Making Words with them.  Find the Making Words instructions on the bubble making words homework.

 During art we painted toilet paper rolls and made bears and bats.  They turned out super cute!

 This afternoon we were very busy with reading and I had left my camera upstairs.  I'm short on pictures of the day but we were not short on learning!  We learned about letter H as we talked about doctors, loosing teeth and not sharing germs.  We also talked about being helpful kids.  We read all about being a "Bucket Filler" in a few different books and then put a classroom bucket into action.  Our classroom bucket hangs on a wall and when kids do things that fill a bucket they are given a pompom.  When they distract from class or make a sad choice they go get a pompom out of the bucket and return it to me.  It was a great activity!   All the kids have a bucket they've taken home with them.  I encourage you to try it for a while!

We spent time working in our reading groups as well, each practicing at their own level.  Look in their binder for the new book today and work on reading that 3x a day (minimum).  Especially work on sounding out the words on the second page.  It's harder when it's not in an order they have memorized and really challenges them to do all the things that good readers do.

In math today we started "Guess My Secret Rule".  With 3 blocks having a matching attribute and 1 block not matching we ask our friend, "What block doesn't match?"  When they answer we ask, "Why?"  Some of the responses to "why?" may include: color, shape, size, or thickness.  You can play this game with a bucket of play kitchen items (3 spoons and a fork for example).  It gets more difficult with the attribute blocks that we use in class but the most important part of the game is being able to verbalize "Why?"

At The Fire Station

We had a fantastic time visiting the fire station!  Thank you so much to the men and women who showed us around, let us examine the truck, hold the hose and watch a fireman suit up.  I was most impressed with the individuals at this station for their patience and ease in dealing with our big group of (mostly) littles.  It was a great experience!

Safety, Salt, Smoke Detectors and Lots of Reading!

What a fantastic day of learning!  We had so much fun this morning with "Fireman Sam" (the hand puppet) as the teacher of the class.  He helped us review our letters, read us stories about firemen, helped us read and even showed us the smoke detector.  It was loud when it beeped, but now we know what it is for and what it sounds like!  We had tons of fun playing in trays of salt during art time.  We discussed "tall" and "short" during math and drew in our journals about what we learned today.  It was so much fun!

 Preschool B took reading to heart today as we practiced our new game "Making Words" as a class.  It's a great activity in the Bubbles extension pack if you need a printable.  We are practicing blending from one sound to the next in our reading.  We also found an interesting page in our encyclopedia and pointed out the names and sounds of the letters to our sock monkeys.  We read one-on-one with Miss Amanda today and each child is doing fantastic.  Not to be outdone by the morning class, we also played with salt today and it always amazes me how much they LOVE this activity and how long they are fully engaged in it.

Happy learning!  We'll see you all on Monday!

Spiders, Bubbles and a Hail Storm

This morning's class was all about the letter S as we talked about Spiders, Miss Muffet and the word "the"!  It was jam packed with activities right from the start.  They all have a new reading book, the letter S book.  I couldn't find my stapler so they are just a sheet of paper.  You can assemble them yourself or send them back Wednesday and I'll cut and staple them for you (found it at the end of the afternoon class!).  The S book is a BIG jump into reading skills.  We are blending words like "Sam" and "at" in the book and can now make "sat".  With the introduction of the sight word "the" we now have to memorize what "the" looks like and remember it!  It's not a word that can be sounded out like the other words.  We made bracelets and a clip card game with the word "the".  PLEASE point it out everywhere until your child has it memorized!  It will give them access to much more text this year once they've mastered it.  We also had a ton of fun making spiders in art and singing spider songs!

Our afternoon class focused on the letter B with bubbles today.  We had a great time blowing bubbles in the back yard.  We even tried to blow some for the chickens who seemed more scared than thrilled with the idea :).  We headed inside when the clouds began to rumble and spent the rest of the class time in the basement with hardly any mention of the larger than grape sized hail pelting down on the world around us.  Please work on the letter B book called "Bam" as homework.

 We drew and wrote in our journals all about blowing bubbles and we played with and started discussing the attribute blocks.  We will begin classifying the blocks with our game "Guess My Secret Rule" on Wednesday.  Have a great Monday night!  I look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!

Nursery Rhymes and Lots of Reading!

What a great day of learning!  Preschool A spent the day learning and playing with Nursery Rhymes.  We learned a few more nursery rhymes from our song that we'll perform at our year end celebration.  We made sparkling stars for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, mittens for 3 Little Kittens, played with blocks, farm animals and practiced reading letters m, t and a!

 Preschool B had a great letter review lesson and then set to work reading and finding letters in their encyclopedia.  Find the page that is marked with a tab and read it with your child before class on Monday.  We also spent time reading one-on-one, coloring and drawing in our journals, playing music, dancing and practicing counting flip chips!

Families

We had such a fun day today learning about families.  We were reviewing the letters M T and A today in our morning class.  I used a company called Create Jigsaw Puzzles to have each child's family picture made into a professional puzzle.  They turned out so fantastic!  Each child has their puzzle as homework.  Keep them at home and do them over and over again.  The minimum goal by the end of the 3 year old preschool year is to be able to do a 12 piece puzzle.

 We had fun with our reading lesson today practicing being a blender (like the video from last week).  We are practicing words like: at, am, mat, tam.  We talked about 'tam' being a nonsense word that isn't real but fun to read.  In math we started talking about ordinal numbers.  We talked about first, second and third.  At home point out different situations like: Mom will be served fish for dinner first, Daddy second and EMan third.  It was fun to watch the 3 year olds explore drawing people.  Some have been drawing people for a while and others are brand new to the idea.  We talked about the different shapes that make up bodies and how to draw them.

Our afternoon 4 year old class got much bigger puzzles.  Unfortunately the options available are pretty much 12 pieces or 100 pieces so we jumped to the big size. This is a REALLY big challenge that kids sometimes don't master until they are 5, 6 or even 7 years old.  Practice with them at home to make your fun family photo puzzle.

We had a great reading lesson with the letter S this afternoon.  We are continuing the strategies from the video posted last week.  Sound out each word slowly, reread the word quickly, move to the next word.  At the end of the sentence go back and reread the whole sentence quickly.  This strategy may seem very repetitive right now, but the books get much harder in the next few weeks and we'll benifit from practicing this way.  Some of our afternoon kids are working on the Moffatt Girls Ready2Read level 1 and are just about done with unit 1.  We're excited to move into the next word families!  We're still working on mastering counting one-to-one in preschool.  Today we played with the pattern blocks while counting.  We also built towers, forests, dragons and other cool things with the shapes.

We had a great day of learning!  I look forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday!

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!