B is for Body

This week we learned about the letter B. On Wednesday we played a game called "Buzz to the Bees". Each child was given a bag with a bee on it and searched the room for pictures of things that start with 'B' to put in their bag.

We also learned about circles. The kids practiced making circles with playdough and quickly discovered that they could use the playdough cups to cut out circles in the playdough.

Out whole group time this week was spent testing our 5 senses and working on our Body Books, which will be coming home soon!

For our 5 senses testing, the kids were blindfolded and used their senses to guess what various things were. They had lots of fun and were all great at figuring it out!

Body Parts and the Letter A

This week has been all about the letter A, circles and the number 2. We also learned some more about specific parts of our bodies.

One of my favorite alphabet activities, especially at the beginning of the year when we are still getting used to preschool, is forming the letters out of playdough. The kids always love to play with playdough, it gives them exposure to the letters and works on their fine motor skills.

On Friday we learned about circles and went on a circle hunt. These are some of the things the kids found around my house that have circles on them. There were many more that couldn't be set on the table! This is a great way to work on things your kids are learning at home. Have them search around the house (or the grocery store, or out the car windows) to find things that are a specific shape or color. 

We did a lot of fun activities this week as we learned about our bodies. Here are a few of my favorites!

On Wednesday we learned about fingers and toes and put our fingers to use doing a puppet show! The kids did an awesome job working together on the first show and as audience members as each child did their own show.

We also got to play Twister on Friday when we talked about left and right!

Mr. Stick Figure Man has now been completed! The kids have loved adding things to him and definitely like how silly looking he turned out.

Back to School!

Last week was an awesome first week of school! We spent most of the week getting the start of year assessments done and getting used to the procedures and expectations of preschool!

We also got started on our basic skills like gross and fine motor development (while playing with play-doh!), scissor skills and gluing.

We started our academics on Friday when we learned all about the number 1. 

Our theme for this month is 'Our Bodies'. We will be learning about the parts of the body and adding those parts to Stick Figure Man as we learn about them.

This week we talked about what they already know. We labeled a body with the parts they could tell me and gave them a chance to draw a picture of themselves. We also did some fun activities like popping bubbles with different body parts and singing songs that got us moving our bodies!

Reading Rocks - Week 2

This camp has been so much fun! I was definitely sad to see it end and have to say goodbye to my students!

This week we learned about 2 new word families. The -ig family and the -un family. We made our awesome pig and sun plates and played a fun game called 'Run to the Sun'.

On Wednesday we reviewed all of our word families with a fun sorting game.

If you would like to continue working on word families over the summer, this website has some awesome lesson plans.

We also practice phonics by sounding out action words and then doing what they said. All our super heroes did some awesome running, flying and leaping. (And probably came home from camp super tired.)

The other focus for our week was sight words!

On Monday we played sight word soccer and sight word bingo.

On Tuesday we played with sight word discovery bottles and played sight word 'hot lava'. What kid hasn't pretended that their carpet is hot lava? We just took the classic game and added words to our 'islands' to help them review!

On Wednesday, we played 'Don't Eat Pete' and "Snapping Out Sight Words'. For this game, the kids were given some snaps and a word to find. Once they found their word on the wall, they got to throw their snap at it. Loud noises are always a hit!

Here are the sight words that your child worked on over the last two week!

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Reading Rocks - Week 1

This week has been so much fun, getting back together with friends from preschool and meetings some new friends!

Every day we have spent some time focusing on phonics and some time learning sight words.

On Monday, we reviewed the alphabet with an egg matching game. The kids were put in pairs and given bags that had eggs with letters on them and objects that started with those letters. They had to match the objects to the eggs.

For sight words, we played two games. Go Fish has been the favorite game of the entire week. We might have to play again. The kids did a great job of matching the words and learning to read them as they went.

We also played a game called "Find a Fish". There were fish placed around the house with sight words on them. The kids had to find the fish that matched the words on their paper and then trace the words with the correct color.

On Tuesday, we spent our phonics time talking about word families and learning -at words. Word families makes reading so much easier! They learn to recognize the ending quickly and words are much less daunting when you only have to sound out the beginning sound! We played some games with fat bat (a balloon with a bat drawn on it), which the kids loved.

For sight words, our first game was "Sight Word Smash". The kids were given a monster truck and a word to smash. They had to drive the truck along the road to their assigned word and then smash it!

We also played sight word twister. Which works the same as normal Twister, just with words instead of colors.

Our activities on Wednesday were inspired by a couple of Dr. Seuss books, Wacky Wednesday and On Beyond Zebra. If you have not read Wacky Wednesday, put it on your list for the next time you visit the library. It is so much fun to look through the book for all the things that are wacky! And of course, we had lots of wacky things at camp that day!

In the book On Beyond Zebra, a boy tells about all the letters that come after Z. We took inspiration from him and made up some of our own words.

Nonsense words are one of the best way to practice phonics because it ensures that the kids are focusing on the letter sounds and not just memorizing words.

We also played a game similar to a cake walk. The kids walked around the letters and when the music stopped, they were given a letter sound and had to figure out who was standing on the letter that makes that sound.

I didn't get any pictures of the second half of the day. We were too busy! We played two different games. The first was "Whack a Word". The kids were given a word that they had to find in the cards on the floor and then whacked their word with a stick. After that, we pulled out the white boards and played tic-tac-toe. The only change I made was that each space on the board was covered with a post-it note that had one of our sight words on it. The kids had to read the word in order to move the paper and make their mark.

Stay tuned for more fun coming up this week!

Sound

During centers this week we've been working on solidifying the alphabet and throwing in a few sight words. We played trashcan basketball, used water guns to shoot the letters off the fence and played the always popular bingo.

Our science lessons this week were about sound. We did several experiments using glass bottles and rubber bands. Ask your kids to tell you how we made the rubber bands make higher and lower sounds and louder and softer sounds.

We also spent a lot of time this week working on Mother's Day gifts! The kids put a lot of thought into what their mom's would like. As we discussed the ways we could paint the pots one student said, "Mom's like flowers, we could paint flowers on them". Another student immediately added, "And husband's! Mom's like husbands!" It made me smile!

The kids all had a blast at water day on Friday. We played several games, but the favorite was "6 and Splash". It's super simple. You take turns rolling a die and when you roll a 6 you get to splash! (We sat around the little pool and let them splash in there.) It was a good way to practice numbers some more and allowed the kids to see how big of a splash they could make and everyone had warning, so we didn't have anyone complaining about water in their eyes.

Bugs and Science

It has been a busy week at preschool!

Monday was our final day of our bugs unit. We got to meet at the park to have some hands on experiences with bugs!

We worked on gross motor skills with a few games like relay races and mosquito tag, made a craft, read bug books and searched for bugs around the park.

This moth apparently wanted to contribute to our bug day because he was just hanging around on the ground!

The favorite part of the day though was definitely the lady bug tent. We let about 1, 500 ladybugs go inside the tent and let the kids take turns going in the tent to observe them. It was so cool to watch them get so excited about bugs! After everyone was done, we tipped the tent over and allowed the lady bugs to escape. The kids got a chance to watch them fly away and to have bugs crawl onto their hands and take off from there.

Back at the school. we started the month of May and our science unit on Wednesday.

During centers this week we did our end of year assessments and we have been doing some alphabet review. We really want to get those letter solidified before preschool. We've also been stretching their minds by doing things like finding which letter is missing from a sequence and matching the letters with objects that start with that letter.

Wednesday our science lesson was about friction. We ran an experiment by pushing a heavy book and a light book across carpet and tile. We determined that carpet and heavy books create the most friction!

Friday was all about colors. We learned about how our eyes see color and talked about what happens when colors combine. We experimented with combining different colors of water to find what new colors we could make.