All About Airplanes

Apparently the letter Q is a popular letter among our students. They were very excited to learn about it and many of them already knew quite a few words that start with Q!

For centers this week we brought out a fun new game. The students were put into teams and raced to see which team could match their tiles to the letters on the paper the fastest. They all did a great job at matching, working together and being good sports! I love how much can be learned from games.

Our mode of transportation for the week was airplanes. The kids did a great job painting their popsicle stick airplanes and we got some practice with gross motor skills and taking turns with airplane relay races.

At the end of the day on Friday, the kids lined the chairs up and pretended to be on an airplane, a race car and a train. They made all the noises and pretended to drive, we even had some backseat driving going on. They put their imaginations to work thinking up new places to go. Some of the most popular destinations were the North Pole, grandma's house and California. We had a momentary halt to the fun when the train broke down, but the kids pulled out their tools and had it fixed in no time! (No, that's not code for anything. They just told me that the train had broken down and they were fixing it!)

Trains, Trains and More Trains

This week was all about trains (and of course, the letter P and the color yellow).

We had lots of fun with P words during centers time. We played with puzzles, pigs and of course, lots of pink and purple.

We learned all about the parts of a train this week. We read lots of books and pulled out the toys trains and rug to explore. We also got to make some of our own trains! I was so impressed with how well all the students did with their train puzzles (pictured below), they were all able to complete it independently! It was fun to watch the different approaches as some kids laid everything out and then started gluing and other put the glue on a piece and then tried to figure out where to put it. 

We also practiced graphing again (we did this once before during our weather unit). It's a tough concept and one that is great practice! We also added a sheet of questions about the graph, that unfortunately we didn't have time to complete. A great way to help your child learn is to ask them questions about things that this that come home from preschool. It helps them to think back and remember what we learned and you can always take the opportunity to expand what we have already talked about!

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a marvelous Christmas and New Years. It was fun to have some time with family, but it's also been nice to get back into the swing of things this week! 

Our letter of the week this week was O. I love O week because the kids already know it, which leaves us time to expand that knowledge further and do some fun activities with it! The kids were able to find all kinds of words around our classroom that had the letter O in them (at the beginning middle and end) and we had fun learning about a couple of O animals, ostriches and octopuses. Today the kids each made their own toilet paper tube octopus.(Thank you for all the donations!)

We also started our Transportation unit. This week we talked about cars and trucks. We learned about Semi-trucks, bulldozers, cement mixers, dump trucks, monster trucks and race cars. Today in class we made our own race cars and had tons of fun racing them!

(Sorry, I can't get the picture to load the right direction!)

We have also been doing all kinds of new things during centers this week! We have started to work on writing our last names. We have also been doing a lot of sorting this week. This semester we are going to be doing a lot of activities to help the kids with things that preschoolers commonly get mixed up (3 & 5, b & d, etc)