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!

Brrrr! Learning Can Be So Cool!

We started off the new year with some COOL learning! First off, we noticed our calendar looked different. Instead of turning over the next number, we are now using our number skills to find it from the mixed up cards in the pocket chart. It's tricky, but we can do it!

 

The letter Ii is a vowel- so we learned about both the long and short sounds it makes. We dripped glue and glitter to make icicles, and constructed igloos out of foam pieces. 

 

 

Colors can be cool too! We talked about how blues, greens and purples are called cool colors, and reds, oranges and yellows are warm colors. Using droppers, we dripped some cool watercolors on our placemats, and tilted our trays until the whole paper was covered. After sprinkling them with salt, and letting them dry overnight, we had some icy looking paper. To finish them up, we added snowflakes to make them look even colder!

 

Our frozen fun continued with ice painting! Using cubes of frozen paint in all our cool colors, we created some wintry art.

Ice Cold Reading! We read a rebus reader called When Water Freezes,  and enjoyed several books at circle time about ice, the arctic and polar animals. We also watched a short video supplement to our magazine that let us take a peek at the arctic- it sure looks different from where we live!

 

 

Our sensory bin is always a favorite spot with the class, and a new month means a new surprise inside for sensory play. For January, we have "snow", polar animals, plastic ice cubes, icy gems and mittens to explore.

 

 

Everything wasn't all about snow and ice- we took some breaks to build some cool contraptions, buddy read in the igloo, and celebrate a special birthday!

Friday was a free form center day. After music with Ms. Bekah, we could choose among several activities, and change center as we liked instead of our usual color groups that stay together for centers. Since one of our centers was going to be ice play, we practiced putting on gloves at circle time. Once you have all the fingers in the right spots- stick that hand up high. Who can do it?? 

We ALL can!!

Ice and Snow Play! 

(The ice was real, the snow was a fun and easy dough you can make at home with one bottle of conditioner and 1 box of corn starch mixed together- it's smooth and cool for playing, and smells wonderful.)

Thumbs up for ice!