Shamrocks! (V, 19, Green, Circle)

Our theme this week was "Shamrocks" and we focused on the letter V, number 19 and we revisited the color green and circle shape.

We read this week: The Rain Came Down by David Shannon
                               Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
                               Llama Llama and the Bully Goat by Anna Dewdney
                               Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss
                               The Night Before St. Patrick's Day by Natasha Wing

Our question of the week was "What would you do with a leprechaun's pot of gold?"

For our theme of the week, we had so much fun getting ready for St. Patrick's Day!

We embraced the theme and made a rainbow with hand prints, complete with a pot of gold at the end. I like this project, but if you can hang things from your classroom/home ceiling, this is a cool variation on the same idea.

Making shamrock hats was super fun as well! This great blog shows how to make easy and awesome hats for any occasion out of paper plates.

We also make leprechaun traps. There are so many great ideas out there for making some pretty elaborate traps. I wanted to make it a little more simple, so we used a paper towel roll and half of a paper plate to make a tunnel that the leprechauns would get stuck in while they were trying to get to the rainbow. The kids had a lot of fun with this!

The Leprechaun's came!! Unfortunately our traps didn't work, but they did leave us some goodies!

No Leprechauns came to visit us, but we did have some visitors outside! This prompted a very involved discussion about camouflage.

Our song of the week was "I'm a Little Shamrock" from here.

"I’m a little shamrock with petals three.
You’ll have good luck if you pick me.
One of my petals will bring you health,
One’s for love and one’s for wealth."

 (C) Jean Warren www.preschoolexpress.com

We talked again about the color green, and we made collages of the color.

Since we already found green items in the classroom. We played a little game called "Category Brainstorm,  and tried to list as many things that we could that are the color green.

We played the same game for the shape circle.

The kids also practiced tracing and recognizing circles. These came from the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 19.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

From the book Numbers and Counting, I had my students draw 19 cookies in the cookie jar. These are great exercises because they have to count while they are drawing which really strengthens the 1:1 concept. and I always have them count when they're finished to check, so it's even more counting practice! 

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Vv from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter V. It's really cool to see the children thinking about what they want to put in their journal. They love these books and always want to go through them when they're finished writing for the day.

We turned a V into a Vulture! This book is great.

This book has great pages for helping the kids work on the letter recognition of both the capital and the lowercase versions of the letter, and they are always a little different, which is great!

Coloring, cutting, gluing... my kind of a project! And this one is super cool. From Letter of the Week Book 1, the kids made the Village of V's! Each door opens to a picture of something that starts with the letter V. And I like that it is something different than just a book. Shakes things up a bit =].

We acted out a Vulture poem from Sounds Like Fun.

For our alphabet wall we made a vegetable garden! I drew pictures of carrots, green beans and lettuce that the kids painted.

Here are the words we came up with this week!

Up next week: "Use Your Noodle!" and a focus on the letter Ww, number 20, color blue and triangle shape.