Where We Are In Place and Time

We had so much fun today talking about where we are in place and time.  With preschoolers it's a continual conversation to help them understand how each day is different and how they are represented on the calendar.  He acted out a whole week of waking up on a day, eating, playing, eating, playing, eating, brushing teeth, going to sleep, and waking up the next day.  While they were "sleeping" they were asked to figure out what day would be next when they "woke" up by singing our days of the week song.  They picked it up really quickly.  Encourage this conversation at home by telling them what day it is and asking them what day will be tomorrow.  The words "yesterday, today, tomorrow" are still not a concrete idea but the pattern of the weekdays should be well learned by now (at least in my classroom as we sing the days of the week all the time).  The kids were even singing it without prompting as they were working on their Very Hungry Caterpillar book today.

We spent a good deal of time talking about how things don't stay the same.  As we grow and learn time is passing and things are changing.  We talked about if we remembered when a sibling was a tiny baby and are they still the same tiny baby or have they grown?  We worked through a very real broken arm scenario with one of our gals by discussing how in the summer her arm wasn't broken and she could do whatever she liked, now her arm is broken and she has some limitations, but in a couple of months her arm won't be broken any more and she can go back to ice skating and other things she loves doing. 

 We've continued our lessons on digraphs (sh, ch, th, wh) and blends (bl, cr, etc).  We're seeing harder words (CCVC* rather than CVC**) in our reading books that indicate a blend at the beginning of the word.  We're also seeing more digraphs as we're ready to dive into more complex reading.  Our practice in 2D vs. 3D shapes is proving that these kids have quite nearly mastered this concept already.  I scheduled the whole month of November to work on them. Maybe we'll start counting faces and vertices, something I've never done with preschoolers before, but they're ready for more than just names. 

*CCVC = consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant

**CVC = consonant, vowel, consonant 

I Like to Move It, Move It!

I still am not sure why the song "I Like to Move It, Move It" broke out among all 8 kids today but it became the theme music to our day.  We got right down to business this afternoon as kids walked in and immediately started working on their reading books.  They are doing so fantastic.  I'm using the series "Now I'm Reading" with them.  It's working great to have a whole set for each child.  They can practice and work on the books at their own pace.  They are a fantastic next step to reading BEFORE tackling any harder phonics.  The simple CVC words are tricky and this series is great practice.  We then wrote about our weekends, most about what they did for Halloween, and then shared with the whole class.

 Today we started learning about the difference between 2D and 3D shapes.  I was quite impressed with the kids who remembered many of the 3D shape names from our lessons last year.  We had fun playing with all the blocks and there was a ton of calling out the correct shape name.  There was also a lot of "I like to move it!" singing, which proved very helpful when it was time to clean the blocks up :).

I utilized the Moffatt Girls November Kindergarten pack for our study about Where We Are In Place and Time.  We worked on filling out the November calendar today.  We sang the days of the week and talked about which day was today and which day would be Thanksgiving.  We also talked about how each day we wake up, eat breakfast, play, eat lunch, play, eat dinner, go to bed and then when we wake up it's a new day and number on the calendar. That was fun to act out :).

Preschool Halloween Party

We had so much fun in preschool today!  Everyone wore their Halloween costumes to school.  We played with balloon "bats", decorated our Halloween bags to carry all of our stuff from the day, read a "Pumpkin Day" book together and explored the parts of pumpkins.

 We played with the seeds and guts of pumpkins.  We also turned our pumpkins into geoboards with push-pins and rubber bands. 

 We wrote spooky haunted house stories and made patterns out of finger prints. 

We had a fun day learning and playing!

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.