Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss - Tot School Tuesday

 Celebrating Dr. Seuss is one of my favorite activities of the year.  We started the day by playing with www.seussville.com on the SmartBoard and painting the brim of our Dr. Seuss hats.  We also painted our craft sticks for Thing 1 and Thing 2 puppets we'd make later. 

 I pulled out the special reading chairs and we read a few Dr. Seuss books.

 I love this picture of my two boys.  They are starting to become such good friends.

 For snack time we had green eggs and gluten free pretzels.

 After snack time we assembled our cute hats.  Aren't these kids adorable?

 We played with Dr. Seuss' Oobleck from Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

 It's squishy and slimy and oh so much fun!

 After Oobleck, we created our stick puppets for Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Monday Preschool - Vehicles

On Monday we played with vehicles and learned the letter R.  We raced race cars and vroomed around the room.

 We used toilet paper tubes to make our own race cars.

 We practiced our shared reading on the smart board with some past books and our new R book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.

 Yummy snack time!

 After snack we had a guided drawing experience.  We talked about the different shapes that we could use to draw cars and boats and trucks.

 We've continued to work on "Hot Cross Buns" on the piano.  Some kids can play it all by themselves!

 We worked on recognizing a hexagon on our shapes board.  Here the boys are revving up their engines "RRRRRRR" and are ready to run to the shape I call out....

 Square!

 Go, go, go!

 At the end of the day we raced our cars around our oval track.  ZR was in charge of the stop and go signs for the track.

 Everybody stop!

 Preschool B reviewed long O words and started talking about long U words.  When you say the letter name U the sounds you make are /y/ /oo/.  Most long vowel words just say their name, but long u only says the second part of its name /oo/ (think of the word "Tube").

 We've also been working really hard on our sight words for the month.  Most of them are words that can be sounded out.  This game board went home as homework to practice reading the words and placing them on top of their correct spots.

 These kids just love counting to 100!

 They got a new 100 chart and were asked to color all the sets of 1-9 (places where the #'s 1-9 are in a row or column).

 Art time was a combination of decorative hole punches, scissors, construction paper and glue.

 For snack we made a smoothie and had some pretzels.

 We're also working on reading paragraphs in our encyclopedias.  I'm hoping that by companion reading pages with them they'll be more prone to doing it on their own for fun.  Companion reading is where I read any words they can't and encourage them to read words that are in their current skill set.

Wheels - Thursday Tot School

I just completely love what I do.  Today's tot school class was no less than excellent :).

 Sorry (again) for the picture heavy post, but I took so many pictures and I didn't want to cut out any of them.

 The theme today was wheels, an excellent interactive theme for all the kids!

 There were bikes and toy cars and trucks everywhere!

 Once EMan started putting his toes in the soil there were a few others that chimed right in and the shoes and socks all started coming off.  I apologize for dirty socks :)

 We played with a tape circle on the ground.  We specifically worked on the vocabulary "in" and "out".  Lil'GalA is out of the circle.  (Don't you just love this photo?)

 CJ is learning to play on ABCmouse.com and is often spending his time doing that during tot school.  Today, however, he couldn't pass up the wheels theme.

 Snack time of gluten free circle cereal and apricots.  We spent a lot of time talking about how they were both shaped like wheels.

 I read My Truck is Stuck and everyone was completely enthralled.

 After snack time we pulled out paint and cars.  We drove them all over the paint and then on our papers.

 After we painted with the cars and trucks they needed to go through the car wash...

 ...add some shaving cream "soap" and they're ready to clean those cars!

 A bucket of water was added a few minutes later to rinse off all the soap.

 Having done this once before, EMan was no stranger to the activity and was ready to take it all on in his messy way.

 Lil'ManJ was having SO MUCH FUN with the car wash.  He kept saying, "Car wash" over and over again.  He would splash in the water and repeat.  It was so fun to watch him.

 Here we are with the Wheels Tot Pack toward the end of the day.  We practiced singing "The Wheels On The Bus" with the arm motions and tracing wheels with our fingers.

 We also matched cars to their correct paint splash and to the correct shape.

We had such an excellent day.  Thank you for sharing your children with me!