Our Herd of Elephants!

We focused in on the tricky letter Ee this week, along with our regular math and literacy learning! Helping us along all week was our book friend Elmer the Elephant.

We cut out 1 large and 2 small gray hearts, and covered them in a patchwork pattern of colorful squares to make elephant masks. Our fine motor control continues to improve- we are learning to use folded paper to make hearts- which will come in very handy in February. :) Our masks turned us into a herd of wild elephants!

Of course, you can't read Elmer books without practicing the letter Ee. This is always a tricky one- the lowercase e is hard to write, and the sound can be hard to distinguish from other vowels. We especially had a fun time holding up big paper ears every time we heard an Ee word in the book Ella the Elegant Elephant- it was chock full of Ee words! We practiced our writing by making enormous E and e patterns on a sentence strip. You might hear your child echo Ms. Heather while writing Ee's- "big line down, little line at the top, at the bottom, and back in the middle" or 

"little line across, Up and Around!" We talked and wrote our letters out loud a lot until we got it. :) We also used the big spinner to have a race to the top between E,e,Q, and q- lots of letter practice at those races!

 

We made some stretchy Ee books this week! 

Our long and short Ee pics all fit along the elephant's long trunk.

Some of our other centers this week were making our fancy flamingo calendars for February, cutting hearts for our placemats, counting sets, magnet letters and word builders, and the return of kitchen center (our igloo went away for the winter). If we had some free time after finishing our center job, it was always fun to head over to the red table and make some colorful patchwork patterns or elephants with friends!

Friday, we did some class cooking and made- what else?- elephant ears! We took a long strip of  bread dough, and rolled and flattened from one end, then rolled and flattened a round coil from the other end. A little bit of melted butter, and some cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top finished them off before baking in the oven for a warm Ee snack. Yum!

Our last stop of a great day is playground!

Pajama Day 2017

We had a wonderful Pajama Day today! 

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Our Week: Fun with Basic Skills!

The Mitten

Our little authors were hard at work at again this week! We enjoyed reading Jan Brett's classic The Mitten,  about a lost mitten becoming a warm spot for lots of cold animals. After reading the story together, we learned a retelling song to practice the story sequence of how the animals crept inside (and were suddenly all sneezed out!). We each had an animal, and brought it up to go in the mitten at the appropriate time. We also pretended WE were the animals, and climbed inside our big mitten outline, ready to leap out when the "bear" sneezed!

After painting our own big mitten shapes, we hunted through magazines for some interesting animals that we thought might want to hide in our mittens. We carefully cut them out and glued them on a snowy painted background. After practicing some pocket chart sentences using I, see, and a, we were ready to try and write our own sentence about our hidden animal. We also snuck in a little mitten math!

 

Side note about preschool writing: In any group of children, we always have a wide variety of comfort levels with creating words and sentences. Writing activities tend to be one on one with Ms. Heather, so each and every child can get the appropriate scaffolding to help them express themselves on paper. This might be letter help, word help, sound isolation, pencil grip practice, orientation on the paper etc. While the end product may look similar, the kids get to that with varying degrees of help. What's important to remember is that we don't compare kids to each other- each and every one is an author with something to say, and is working hard to gain the skills necessary to express themselves.

We worked on some mechanics of writing as well this week. Our names continue to be refined, substituting lowercase letters for all caps, keeping things in a line and working on letter scale and size. We started using the letter boxes (see below) to write our names and other words. The boxes are tall for tall letters, lower for under the baseline letters, and attached in a level row. It's really helped with cleaning up our names, especially for those very early writers who are cementing some basic conventions such as keeping letters in order and in a row to make a word. Just for fun, we also built ice cream cones so that the scoops matched the number of letters in our names.

Alphabet Letters and Sounds

We continued practicing with all the letters this week. Using our magnets, we built lots of letters at circle time, including our I and i. Our ABC soup center had us scooping (or grabbing) a picture card, listening for the initial sound, and sorting it into the correct soup can. We also used our mystery box to match up some upper and lower case letter puzzles, talking about the sounds with each one. Our highlighting center had a big spinning wheel with all the letters on it. Each time we spun the wheel, we found the corresponding letter on our paper and highlighted it. Repetition, repetition, repetition!

Cooperative Fun

Our ice cream parlor was open several days! It featured many sundaes and cones topped with sprinkles, cherries, and gummy bears. The soft pom pom scoops of "ice cream" were served to kids and teachers all morning. One day, we had real neapolitan ice cream at snack, and taste tested each flavor. We graphed our results and talked about what we found out about ice cream preferences in our room. We also had special fruit race cars one day, and celebrated a friend's special birthday at snack this week!

We also used tiny animals and real mittens to recreate The Mitten folktale with our friends. Lots of non story animals crawled inside the mittens, too, leading to new stories and adventures.

                                      

Blocks and trains are perennial favorites!