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.

Working with Word Families

Today in preschool we reviewed the letter O.  We spent time using the letter O in two common word families: -ot and -op.  The goal was to make as many words as we could and figure out how they are the same and different from the opposite word family.  As we talk about letters and sounds in words we're drawing attention to the sounds in the beginning, middle and end.  The word "top" came up so we took a little break to play with tops on the tables.  As kids worked on a word family sorting page (after I had worked through it with the whole group) I was able to read one-on-one with each child and I have to tell you that these kids are doing fantastic!  It's not common to teach 4 year olds how to read in a preschool setting, but I LOVE watching the light in their eyes as they recognize that they are readers and are in charge of their own brain power to accomplish a difficult task.

 We're continuing talking about passions and interests of each child and spent our writing time practicing our clock letters while we were drawing and writing about our favorite things.

As promised, the Guess My Secret Rule game was back again with new options.  We added size and thickness (fat like a hamburger, skinny like a lettuce) to our options for rules.  It made the game quite a bit more challenging but we're getting the hang of it!

New Basement

Ok, I admit, I teased you about posting pictures of our awesome new school room and then I didn't post them.  Now a month later I'm catching up!  Yay!  We are having a fantastic time in our new school room with both the Preschooler and my own kiddos in our homeschooling adventure!  We took out a wall, added a TON of bookshelves (which means my boys have been reading so much more on their own now that they can get books by themselves), and made a nice little nook for the SMART Board.  We're loving it!  Thanks for pardoning our dust over the summer!

Guess My Secret Rule - a Comparing and Classifying Preschool Math Game

Guess My Secret Rule is one of my favorite games to teach preschoolers.  It introduces comparing and classifying language into our math day in such a fun way.  There are a few rules to this game.  Each person builds their own "sets".  Each set needs 4 blocks.  Within those 4 blocks three of them have to be the same and one has to be different.  Then they get to ask anyone in the room to guess their secret rule by telling which one doesn't match.  Once the person guesses the builder of the set has the most important question to ask, "Why?".  Then the guesser has the opportunity to describe the characteristics that match or don't match.  Today we played with pattern blocks, which gives the game a very small framework of choices for things that match (color and shape).  Next week we'll start playing with attribute blocks were descriptors like size, shape, color, and thickness will also be in play.

The sound isn't great, but I just had to capture the kids doing such a fantastic job at this game today:

We also continued our work on writing clock letters (focus on lowercase a today).  

 Sharing our work is one of the best ways to get kids to talk about themselves and develop the confidence to share and learn from each other.

 Our reading lessons today were so much fun with glitter sight words and success in reading and blending!

 Keep up the great work at home!

Growing Our Muscles!

You just can't plan for these things in the classroom... Today we spent almost the whole time talking about growing our muscles, including our brains.  It started out with a child saying his hand was too tired to practice writing any more. My gut reaction was filled with enthusiasm, "GREAT! That means you're growing your muscles!" Promptly EVERYONE in the class had tired hands, legs and heads.  Thus, the conversation of growing muscles continued throughout the day.  "Shh!! Watch! He's growing his brain!" was said more than once as a child was demonstrating or sharing with the group.  It was so much fun!

 Today we reviewed the letter P and added the sight word "ball".  The kids had so much fun "taking a picture" mentally of the word so they could remember it.  We also continued our conversation about clock letters practicing the letter C.  In math we're wrapping up our number sense unit and had the opportunity to play a few games again.  We made ten frames with Q-tips, tornadoes made our base ten blocks get thrown all around and they needed sorting back onto decimal street, we built the 1-20 chart and made chains 20 links long.

It was such a fun day of learning!

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!